Bitter Field

by Jack Ludlow

  Peter Lanchester was beside the idling Simca and the passenger door was open. Within seconds both men were inside and the car was moving, Cal holding the light machine gun upright between his knees and breathing as if he had just finished an Olympic marathon while simultaneously reloading.

  ‘Left-hand fork, Peter,’ he gasped.

  ‘You sure? The lorry went right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The car swung round the bend and took only seconds to cover the hundred yards or so Cal Jardine wanted, during which time he had wound down the car window and manoeuvred the muzzle out, forced to lean back so it was resting on the sill. With trees on both sides of the canal and the still-billowing smoke, what he was looking for was not fully visible until he was right abreast the main target at the front.

  Slowly and deliberately he put several bullets into the front wheel of the Hispano-Suiza roadster, shredding the tyre in the process, before shifting to blast the cars lined up behind, this as Peter, unbidden, drove the car at low speed so all Cal had to do was work the trigger.

  His last bullets he saved for the rear vehicle of the Jeunesses’s convoy, a low-slung cream and black Citroën. This he shredded from one end to the other, tyres included, and, as soon as the magazine emptied, Peter pressed the accelerator to the floor, with Cal dropping back into the seat exhausted.

  It took a second or two to get his breathing back to something like normal, but soon he was pointing out to his companion that, narrow and empty as it was, he was driving dangerously by going too fast as well as being on the wrong side of the road – just as well, as, before ten minutes had passed, they were forced to pull very hard to the side to let past one rushing police car, soon followed by two more.

  The fellow driving the lorry had been told to take himself and his companions home using back roads and to find a way to hide the vehicle. The Simca presented another problem; it was not a model of which there were many about, being a new design and fresh off the production line.

  So it was too obvious, given its colour and the fact that it would likely be reported to the authorities, number plate included. They had taken the route that led north to the main highway, then followed that west to the outskirts of town where they stopped to both breathe and consider.

  ‘I take it,’ Peter asked, ‘that I am sitting in what was your way out?’

  ‘I was going to drive back to Paris once the cargo was loaded, sell it, and then head home by train.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Too risky, given we have no idea of the depth of what we are fighting. I’ll have to get rid of it and think of something else. You?’

  ‘I told you, Cal, I’m sticking like—’

  ‘I got it the first time.’

  ‘And you still intend to oversee the loading of the weapons?’

  ‘That is what I am contracted to do.’

  Peter nodded, he had expected no less; in a game fraught with danger, the possibility of dying in the act was a given – in fact, no different to being a serving soldier. Then there was the problem of reputation, quite apart from any sentiment to the republican cause; running guns was as much Callum Jardine’s profession as intelligence gathering was that of Peter Lanchester. You just did not quit when the going got hard if you wanted to stay in the game.

  Getting back into La Rochelle, Cal explained, presented little difficulty; they could walk into the suburbs and catch the bus. First the car had to be put behind some trees and then, while they were out of sight of the road, they had to clean themselves up using saliva, a handkerchief and the car’s mirror, though they could do nothing about the foul after-combat taste in their mouths.

  Personal clean-ups completed, Peter went to work on the car in the same way he had on that La Rochelle apartment, wiping the steering wheel, door handles and all of the instruments and switches, removing all traces of their fingerprints, Cal watching him silently and in doing so was gifted a sudden realisation, brought about by what was happening now, added to the feeling of curiosity he had experienced prior to abandoning Peter’s apartment that morning.

  Peter’s blazer was marked from where he had rolled across the road into the ditch, but apart from that he was more or less all right and a bit of hand brushing removed most of the dried muck. Cal was more scratched and bruised and his shoulder ached, while his shirt, quite apart from the stains, was ripped both at the elbows and the front, which left his companion unhappily lending him one of his spares.

  ‘Jermyn Street for you, old chum,’ Peter insisted, ‘the minute we get back to Blighty. I’ll be having a few items in replacement on your Turnbull & Asser account.’

  Cal was not listening; he was crouched down breaking up the ZB26, laying the parts on the shirt he had just removed. ‘This will have to go in your case, Peter, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What!’ Peter demanded, looking over his shoulder from the tree against which he was pissing away the last of his two beers.

  ‘You don’t expect me to just leave it.’

  ‘Might I point out to you, old chum, that it is somewhat oily, and that shirt of yours is not going to stop it damaging the rest of my kit, not least my cream linen suit.’

  ‘Still got that knife of yours?’

  ‘I have.’

  Passed over, Cal used it to cut out the upholstery from the back seat of the car, wrapping his broken-up weapon in that before closing the case and handing it over.

  ‘There you are, Peter, satisfied? Best I carry it, given what it contains. Now let’s get back onto the road and get walking till we find a bus stop.’

  ‘I’m curious as to how you are going to reconnect with your barge.’

  ‘So am I.’

  The walk was not far, though in still-flat open country at once fraught with the fear that some of their recent opponents might appear. Once in a built-up area it became easier, and having found a stop, they took a hot and crowded bus marked Centre Ville into town.

  There was a definite frisson in the air when they got there, people talking and gesticulating, a lot of gendarmes around and the ringing of the traffic-clearing bells of police cars, which forced them into the backstreets and a welcome drink in the dark recesses of a small, dingy and far-from-clean workers’ bar.

  ‘And to think I always equated you with luxurious living.’

  ‘We don’t know what connections these sods have, Peter, or yet how they got onto us.’

  ‘On to you, Cal,’ he replied, pedantically.

  ‘And I thought you wanted to be part of my gang.’ Cal joked, even if, deep down, he felt Peter to have been the cause of the problem.

  ‘Can’t afford the laundry bill, old chap, or the seamstress to repair the kit, and that says nothing for the catering.’

  ‘HMG doesn’t pay you enough.’

  ‘Understatement, Cal, they pay a pittance.’

  At Cal’s insistence, they took another bus to Le Port on the grounds that a taxi was potentially traceable, buying their own billets and sitting apart, with both keeping an eye out for anyone official seeking to board and examine papers.

  Once in the port and seeing no sign of anything that posed a threat, they walked up the canal towpath, thankfully with the sun going down and the heat of the day dissipating. His fear of not finding the barge proved to be an unnecessary worry; the men crewing it had stopped outside the basin on the edge of the industrial zone where it joined the canal coming in from the south, before a branch that went through to the commercial port.

  His two Basques and the French owner were sitting on the deck, quietly smoking and looking innocent. After a quick look to ensure no one was watching, they approached the barge, jumped aboard and immediately disappeared below into the cramped and stuffy cabin.

  ‘And now what happens?’ Peter enquired.

  ‘We wait until the right people have come on shift.’

  ‘Are you not a little light on muscle for what you have to do?’

  ‘I am, but thankfully we have you along.’

&n
bsp; ‘It’s at times like these,’ Peter sighed, pulling out his packet of French cigarettes, ‘that I wish I’d paid more attention at school.’

  With nothing much to do till the sun went down, and neither willing to indulge in much more useless speculation as to how the Jeunesses Patriotes had got on to Cal’s cargo, they turned to talking about old times, which tended to sound rosy in retrospect and had been bloody awful in fact.

  As subalterns, they had first met in the dying weeks of the Great War at a time when everyone thought the retreating Hun were beaten, but they were not; their retreat was orderly and designed to inflict maximum casualties when, as they often did, they made a stand. Jerry was always forced to fall back but no position or trench was surrendered without a hard and costly fight.

  When those times were reprised there was no mention of any deep friendship between the two, more a degree of natural mutual respect, given that first quality had been absent. It was more than just an inability to connect, it being a bad idea to get close to anyone at such a time.

  No two men who had lived through those days could discuss them without recalling, even if they avoided mention of it, the losses they had witnessed, both in fellow officers and the men they led; anyone being killed was bad, but a close friend dying could break those who survived, men who lived on the very edge of what could be tolerated by the human spirit.

  Both had stayed in the army, Cal for personal reasons, Peter for the lack of a real alternative and, meeting again in the part of Mesopotamia destined to become Iraq, there had been no flowering of friendship at all – Captains Callum Jardine and Peter Lanchester had been on two sides of an argument about the tactics being employed to contain the Arab insurgency.

  Peter, like most of his contemporaries, saw nothing untoward in bombing villages or pounding the insurgents and their families with artillery – the end justified the means. Cal disagreed so vehemently he had eventually resigned his commission, though, unable to settle, he had become, almost by accident, a gunrunner and advisor to various freedom movements on guerrilla warfare, much of the art of which he had learnt from his Arab opponents.

  The Peter Lanchester he had known before Hamburg, as an acquaintance not a friend, seemed typical of a type that saw England as the centre of the universe, though they would nod to the useful contributions of the Celtic fringe in the making of Great Britain and the Empire. But they saw the unemployed as work-shy, Jews as devious Yids, Arabs were wogs and not to be trusted, while anyone Latin, especially South Americans, could be dismissed as a slimy dago.

  In that, Peter had seemed typical of his class and the company he kept, the denizens of ex-military officers’ clubs and the golf course bores who saw anyone not Anglo-Saxon as somehow incomplete. Yet he had proved to have another side; he hated Fascism as much as did Cal and had the brains to also, like him, see leaving it to grow unchecked as a threat to everything he valued.

  It was Hamburg and after that had got them closer, though both, if asked, would probably have plumped for being semi-chums rather than deep pals. Yet Cal, who knew he was the one who harboured the resentments, had come to respect Peter more.

  The shared experience of acquiring and illegally shipping guns had created a sort of bond, which he would have struggled to define, given the disparity of many of their views; the only thing of which he was sure was that in a crisis, Peter was utterly reliable.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When the time came to start the donkey engine and move it was dark, the only light the faint glow coming from the city spill, until they were in the well-illuminated dock area. Peter was not allowed to see but only to hear the exchange between Cal and the douaniers, noting that it lacked for nothing in the sound of formality, down to the thud of stamps being banged on the false cargo manifests; if money changed hands, that was carried out in silence.

  He was allowed out of the stuffy cabin only when the barge was out in the harbour, with Cal pointing to the set of lights – three horizontal white and one red – that identified his freighter, which they edged alongside, throwing up heavy cables so they could be lashed, metal to metal.

  The ship had a derrick which did the actual lifting aboard and a crew to do the stowing; it was getting the boxes out of the barge hold that constituted the toil, which was carried out stripped to the waist, took all night and left the two Brits and their companions with sweat-soaked bodies and aching muscles.

  When it was finally empty they and the Basques went aboard the ship, the latter disappearing to the crew quarters while Cal went to talk to the captain, returning to say that he had arranged that they should be taken into land down the coast by the ship’s motor boat the following day. He could then allow the barge to cast off and return to the canal system and its home berth, not a problem now that it was empty.

  As the engines of the freighter began to throb through the ship and the anchor chain rattled aboard, Peter had first dibs at getting properly washed and shaved, Cal doing likewise using kit he had borrowed. By the time they cleared the outer roads they were tucking into what Peter called a proper breakfast in the master’s cabin: eggs, bacon and sausages and toast, with a mug of strong tea.

  ‘None of that French muck,’ he insisted. ‘No wonder they get so fractious with each other when they start the day on nothing but bread and bloody jam. You can’t think straight on a rumbling stomach, old boy.’

  That consumed and it being the beginning of another hot day, it was two deck loungers on the shaded side of the main housing and some very welcome sleep.

  They were still on deck and awake, sipping gin and tonics and with the sun now dipping into the western horizon, when they turned to the subject closest to Peter’s heart: the recruitment of Cal to work in Czechoslovakia, a request to which he was sure he had more than qualified for an answer, while the man in question still had doubts about that, as well as other matters.

  ‘It might be best to tell me what it is you want and it would also be helpful to know what it is you are trying to achieve.’

  The response from someone normally so unruffled bordered on the impatient. ‘I take it that is a yes, old boy?’

  ‘No, Peter, it’s a bloody question. Who is running this and why? Next question, what is wrong with using your own people?’

  Peter stood up and went to the deck rail to look out over the sparkling waters of the Bay of Biscay, which reflected in the depth of their blue the colour of the sky, taking out another gasper and lighting up, drawing slowly several times and exhaling clouds of spent smoke. Cal wondered if he was really thinking or play-acting, increasing the tension in order to make more dramatic what he was going to say.

  ‘If you repeat what I am about to say to you, I will probably be chucked out on my ear or slung into Brixton for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.’

  Then he spun round to give Cal the kind of look that made sure he knew what he had just said was serious. ‘The word from on high – not, I might add, on any piece of paper anyone has ever clapped eyes on – is that Britain will not even contemplate going to war over the Sudetenland, and if we don’t budge the French won’t either.’

  ‘They have a treaty with the Czechs.’

  ‘They won’t honour it without the backing of Perfidious Albion and that’s not likely to be on offer.’

  ‘Not even if it could be proved to be a mistake.’

  ‘Of course it’s a bloody mistake and I don’t need you to tell me that!’

  ‘Sorry, but that does not answer either part of my question.’

  ‘Needless to say there are folk in SIS who do not see my return in a wholly benign light, given what I got up to just prior to being called back in.’

  He was not talking about Ethiopia but London. A couple of serving SIS operatives, either for money or conviction, one a pilot, the other a navigator, had helped to purchase a plane and had then flown a semi-exiled General Franco from the Azores to Morocco so he could take part in the senior officers’ revolt.

  It was a moot point
if the rebellion would have been as successful without that intervention, given he was the man who could guarantee the participation of the hardbitten colonial troops he had at one time commanded in a country where the metropolitan army was useless.

  Peter, on behalf of his previous employers, had been shadowing the pair prior to their departure in an attempt to discover their intentions in the hope of putting a block on what they intended, albeit he had no idea of the plan. In that he had utterly failed, but it said a great deal about the outfit of which he was once again part. It was obvious the pair could not have acted as they did without at least a nod from some of their more senior colleagues.

  ‘How many of your colleagues are actually pro-Nazi?’

  ‘Pro-Nazi might be calling it too high, but they are definitely anti the Soviets and anyone who travels with them, which includes any government called a “Popular Front” and loaded with socialists and trade unionists.’

  Peter was alluding not just to Spain but to the coalition which had run France for two years, to introduce such wonders as the forty-hour working week and paid annual holidays, the underlying point being that, for all his protestations about his colleagues not being actual fascists, one or two must be flying pretty close.

  ‘Whatever their views, the number is less significant than their mere presence, which makes it near impossible to meaningfully formulate a strategy on the dictator states so we can properly advise the Government.’ Peter sighed and flicked his fag over the side. ‘And before you ask, I am sure there are quite a few crypto-communists in the outfit as well, equally, if not more, discreet.’

  ‘Surely you work in compartments?’

  ‘We do and I must say this, there is no leak of military secrets to Jerry or anyone else we can trace, it’s the political we’re adrift on. Let’s leave it at this – there are chaps in SIS who can see no further than the lead editorials in the Daily Mail, a fair few who would not even object to Oswald Mosley as prime minister.’