by Thomas Wood
The stairs were clear and, making sure that he was going to be the first one in the cross hairs, I pushed him down the stairs, digging the pistol into his back just a little bit more, so that I was certain he hadn’t forgotten about it.
I knew that it was all over now, the fiasco that had surrounded my life for the best part of a year was all going to come to a head in the next half an hour or so. I knew that no matter what happened in the proceeding minutes, the likelihood was that Jameson would end up dead, Red too would be killed and I was going to be executed. I just hoped that I would be able to inflict some casualties myself, my primary; Joseph Baudouin. If I got him, then my life would feel fulfilled. I simply had to be the one that wiped that piece of scum from the face of the earth.
But I would have to wait, I needed him as some sort of bargaining chip for now, to buy myself a few more minutes on this earth.
I felt somewhat melancholic as I pushed the door open with a squeal, inviting Joseph forcefully through the gap, as I knew that there was no point trying to put up any kind of a fight now. It was merely my pride that was making me do this, as Joseph was right, I was in over my head. I had been drowning for some time.
As I stepped out of the factory and began to frogmarch Joseph over to the train track, I realised that Red had reshuffled a few of his men in the intervening minutes, so that a proper showdown could take place. I imagined that he was loving every second of this, recalling how he loved American western films that frequented the cinemas that had popped up during the Phoney War, and how he loved to scream “Yee-Haw!” whenever we were travelling at high speed in the tank.
The gravel beneath my feet crunched and scraped along the soles of my feet, the same noise echoing from the bottom of Joseph’s shoes also, as we stepped onto the railway track, taking up position on one of the wooden sleepers that ran the length of the track.
The factory door, the one that we had just emerged from, was now over to my right, the warehouse on the other side of the track was now situated on my left.
Red was approximately two hundred yards away from where we both stood, pistol still in his hand, down by his side, but I noticed he had another weapon strapped diagonally across his back, possibly an MP40 judging by the size of the thing.
Jameson was still on his knees, now dribbling pathetically and doing nothing to stop the snot that was hanging from both his nostrils. Jameson was resting his knees on one of the wooden beams of the railway line, still maintaining a presence of mind that told him that kneeling in the gravel would cause all sorts of problems on his exposed kneecaps, particularly as they were both bleeding heavily already.
Over both of Red’s shoulders were the motorbikes, their sidecars still menacingly manned by two machineguns, which were flanked on either side by equally troubling soldiers, each of them fully equipped with a rifle or submachine gun.
Just above Red’s shockingly ginger hair, I could make out the tops of one of the trucks, and I knew only too well that if all went wrong, then my corpse could be transported in the back of them in a few minutes. That’s if they bothered to move my body at all.
The sun had now disappeared completely behind the horizon, the large, imposing structure of the warehouse acting as a sort of shade, which cast the whole area into a more damning darkness than the rest of the landscape.
For the first time since I had laid eyes on him up in the factory window, Jameson began to lift his head up, acknowledging my presence. He must have known that I was there before now, but the look that he gave me was not one of reassurance or hope, but one of total dejection and surrender.
We had both failed in our duty. We had both made mistakes that had led us here. And now, there was nothing that we could do.
As he stared at me, I could almost see the faucets beginning to turn as his eyes were filled with the biggest tears imaginable. It is hard to picture the size of a man’s tears as he faced certain death, and it is arguable that the size of a man’s tears do not in fact change at all. But the tears that Robert Jameson cried on that evening were the size of golf balls, something that I believed very strongly reflected how much he had felt like he had failed. He wasn’t meant to be there. He never had been the kind of man that would have survived something like this.
He had had moments of bravery and brilliance, but the fact of the matter was he had stuck out ever since we had arrived in France. He was a member of the gentlemanly class, the class that had never before got their uniforms grubby and certainly not the kind to get them bloodied. He would have been more at home in the gardens of Buckingham Palace than in the sanguinary fields of France.
As we locked eyes with one another, I tried my hardest to produce a smile, or maybe even a few tears of my own, anything really to try and fill him with a confidence that said that neither of us had anything to fear by dying. But nothing came from me, I was completely emotionless, deadpan, all because I didn’t have a care in the world what happened to Jameson anymore. We had both been pawns in a very large game and sometimes, it was necessary to sacrifice the pawns, to save the king. Sometimes, it is even necessary to sacrifice a pawn, in favour of another pawn.
I looked away from him at the thought, as I began to debate what would be in store for us now that we had emerged from the safety of the factory window.
I tried to distract myself from Jameson, as I continued to feel his eyes burn into my face, by looking at as many of the German soldiers that were apparently acting as Red’s own personal bodyguards at the moment. Every single one of them must have been tested in combat, as they were young, but old enough to have been in one of Germany’s major offensives of the last eighteen months or so. Most of them, bar one or two, must have been older than me, around twenty-five or twenty-six years old, their eyes hiding a maturity that can only come with a battle-hardened soldier.
They all came across as quite relaxed and laid back, all brandishing weapons, but fingers quite deliberately off their triggers. Good, I thought, none of these boys were going to be accidentally discharging their rounds if I was to make any sudden movements. They were going to be waiting for a very specific order, the question was, which man would they take the order from? The treacherous but troubled red-haired British soldier closest to them, or would it be from the detestable, demonic thirty-year-old Frenchman that was currently being held at gunpoint? Maybe it was going to be from the disinterested old German officer that stood just behind Red’s left shoulder, seeming to cower away slightly from what could happen. Only a very high ranking, unproven officer would behave in that way.
I suddenly had a thought that there was a very slim possibility that I was going to be able to make something out of this, maybe having Joseph as a bargaining chip really would work in my favour. All of them seemed so nonchalant, their minds obviously elsewhere, maybe on what they would be eating for their tea, or the next chapter of the novel that they were reading, that there was a slight chance that they would react too slowly.
I decided to test my theory and observe how alert they really were.
With the underside of my foot, I kicked out at Joseph, catching him perfectly across the back of both his knees, which sent him crashing to the ground with a thud. A slight pause developed, which was quickly shattered by an uproarious and furious scream as the pain in his knees, as he made contact with the gravel, began to make ground, sending the signal to his brain to begin his howls.
I quickly took a step back from him, keeping my arm outstretched to make sure that I would still have a pretty well-aimed shot at the back of his head, if and when the time came. I had given myself enough distance in stepping away from him, to be able to have another half a second to react, if he was to suddenly turn on me and try to take me on. That half a second would be all I needed to kill him and start running.
Joseph Baudouin was not a stupid man however, and I was sure that he would have known that to make any such movements now would be a death sentence to him, and that he would resolve to not make any such motions for th
e foreseeable future.
To my surprise, the soldiers that were keeping watch over the proceedings barely even winced, the only one to make any kind of flinching whatsoever was Jameson, as he turned away from watching the events unfold before him. He couldn’t quite believe that I was still trying to put up some sort of resistance.
“I’m going to shoot him!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, finally succeeding in waking a few of the sentries up, my roar bouncing off the enclosed walls of the warehouse and the factory, making me feel twice the size that I actually was.
“Give me Jameson, and I’ll give this scumbag back to you!”
I watched as Jameson gradually rose his head up, to look at me once more, apparently flattered that I would have considered him worthy of trying to get him away alive, especially in the presence of far more valuable individuals than he. He began to suck in large quantities of air as he became more and more excited, the gag in his mouth working overtime, flapping around far more furiously than the Union flag on top of the Palace of Westminster.
I was concerned that he would begin hyperventilating if we weren’t too careful, and I was unsure if he was going to be in the right frame of mind when he made his way over to me. I was expecting him to fight and, right now, it seemed that all he was thinking of was a hot bath and a lie down.
They weren’t going to shoot at me now, I was quite confident of that, because as soon as they made movements to fire, I would drag Joseph to his feet, and use him as a shield, one that they could not guarantee the safety of, especially in the half-darkness that we were now enshrouded in.
Even the Germans weren’t stupid enough to risk killing one of their most valuable assets for the sake of trying to hit a British soldier, who seemed bent on getting himself killed in a hail of bullets.
We all waited with bated breath to see what would happen next and I noticed that even a few of the German soldiers had turned their heads towards Red, to see how the dramatic exchange would begin to unfold.
I soon had my answer, to more than one question, as the pressure built up in Jameson’s head was suddenly relieved.
As Jameson slumped forwards, I could see that half of the back of his skull had been blown away, exposing a mess of pinks and reds that could only have been his brain.
All I could hear once again was the sound of my own breathing, as I watched Red, the man that I had once trusted with my life, begin to wipe bits of skin and blood away from his face, the body parts of the one man that I had trusted more than myself.
I was alone once again. I had no one. I had been betrayed. Again.
27
Unblinkingly, I stared at the lifeless corpse of Robert Jameson, wondering if he had known at that moment exactly what was about to happen. He had taken a round right at the top of his head, so much so that a neat part of his skull had been blown away, and I hoped that in doing so, his life had ended swiftly and without any real pain.
As his glistening blood began to pour out over the train tracks surrounding him, I couldn’t help but think of him as an eternally brave soul, all notions of the fear that he had experienced since being here had been totally wiped from my mind, and the idea of thinking about it ever again was preposterous to me.
I thought about, if I was to make it home, what I would say to his uncle in the War Office, or what I would say to any of his family members if I was to ever meet them. I had covered up my story to my own parents but, in his death, I wondered if they would have appreciated the full version of events. But that might just put them in more trouble than it was worth, especially as Jimmy was back in London still calling the shots, I couldn’t trust him one bit.
Jameson deserved a medal, or a mention in dispatches, something along those lines and I felt pitifully sad that he would never get such a recognition, as none of this would ever go much further than the factory complex, or so I presumed. No one would know how Jameson, or I had died, we would just become two more M.I.A.s, whose bodies were never recovered or found. We would just become part of the landscape.
I didn’t know what to do, as I stared at his lifeless body, noticing that Red had taken a few paces backwards, so that he could avoid the reservoir of blood from staining the soles of his shoes.
Jameson had been the only reason that I was out here, trying to bargain with them, otherwise Joseph would have been bleeding to death as soon as I had seen that he’d called in the troops behind him. Now that he was gone, what was I supposed to be fighting for now? I had all of my answers to all of my questions. I had not been the loyal fighter that Jimmy had wanted of me. I had not been the obliging soldier who only followed orders, blinkered. No, I had been the scapegoat for all of their little loose ends, I had become the betrayed.
I had no real way of retaliating. I wouldn’t have been able to pull my pistol up and gun Red down before I was peppered with a thousand bullets from every possible angle. The only thing that they wanted now was Joseph, and I supposed that they would want him alive.
I did the only thing that I could really think of, slowly, feeling the weight of the pistol more than I ever had done before, I brought the gun up, so that it rested in the slight divot at the base of Joseph’s skull where, if I was to put a bullet through it, he would be dead, but not instantly.
I wanted to make sure that he died, but that he was going to go in the slowest way possible. I blamed him for everything, all the deaths and the destruction that I had been forced to carry out, and all of the executions that had been sanctioned by the coward Jimmy Tempsford in London, all of it was down to him. He was the only one that I could take my anger out on now. He was the only one that I was focusing on.
My left hand cupped under my right, so that I had a much more stable platform to fire from, I began to half close one eye, so that I made absolutely certain that I wasn’t going to miss. I would have only one bullet, before the others were spat towards me like a shower of sparks, and I wanted to make sure that it would be all that I needed to take.
My legs shuffled around involuntarily as I adjusted my footing, making myself appear far more threatening and deadly than I actually felt.
Less than a second had passed since Jameson had been executed, and I found myself squeezing the trigger of my pistol, gently at first, to kill the man that I had long harboured a desire to murder. My arms ached rabidly as I tried to keep the pistol steady, the result of days of hard labour with little rest in between to recover. The pistol felt so heavy that I was almost ready to drop it at my feet and run, but something was acting as glue to my hands, something was telling me that I simply could not give up now.
My pressure on the trigger was such that I barely believed that a round hadn’t exploded from the end of the barrel yet. The sweat that rolled off my fingers in droves began to help my finger slide around slowly, to the point where I made a concerted effort to keep it exactly where it was meant to be.
There can’t have been too much further to go before the gun erupted now, and I began to close both my eyes as I prayed for the explosion of pain that would immediately succeed the noise of the bang.
I squeezed and squeezed, forcing my quaking finger further and further into the spring of the trigger, the—
“Wait! Alf! Stop!”
For a brief moment, I was almost relieved that he had called out to me, as I didn’t think that it was within me to try and execute this man after I had committed so many murders. This had been the first one that hadn’t been on instinct, I had been thinking this one through.
I locked eyes with Red for the first time since he had killed my one and only loyal friend, his eyes refusing to offer up any type of apology or remorse for what he had done.
Even from there, his loud Geordie tones could be heard as he called out to the officer who was still cowering behind him. I wondered at which point he would resume command of the situation and begin to behave like a real officer should.
“Let me talk to him. He won’t shoot me. Trust me.”
The officer gave
a curt nod of his head, which resulted in many of the relaxed soldiers around him becoming even more so, hands so far away from triggers that, if I had had enough ammunition, I thought I would have been able to shoot them all before they even managed to fire one round back in return.
Simply stepping over the corpse of Jameson, he started to crunch his way over the gravel of the railway, each pace being carefully calculated and thought through. I stared at him as he came closer to me, and I noticed how his tall, wiry frame that I had become so accustomed to a year ago, was stockier now, he had filled out greatly. I supposed that the rations the Germans gave to their informers was far better than that of the British Army.
He walked with a greater confidence than he ever had done before, which I supposed had far more to do with the firepower that he had stockpiled behind him than any other kind of character defining development that the Germans had empowered him with.
The crunch of the gravel increased loudly as it started to bounce off the walls of the factory and warehouse, the sound of my breathing being the only other thing to compete with its volume.
He only had about one hundred and fifty yards to go, and now I could make out his eyes were wild and fired up, more so than they ever had been before. This sort of thing was what he had come to live for.
My hatred for Joseph waned dramatically, as if a dam had burst, my feelings for Red suddenly reaching maliciously dangerous levels all of a sudden, so much so that I began to think whether I should take my chances and bury a few rounds in him instead.
The Germans could keep Joseph, and maybe then I would still be able to take that deal that he had offered me, and one day run off to Switzerland to enjoy a peaceful life in the mountains. If I was to dispatch of Red, then maybe I could take his place and that I would take a special place in Joseph’s pecking order after such a display of loyalty.