Staying Alive

by Staying Alive (retail) (epub)

  ‘Came near running into some of ’em once – not here, at Barcarès – but you hear ’em coming, crunch crunch crunch, drop flat an’ let ’em crunch on by. Gendarmes, those were. Now we’re looking out for Boches – account of these dumps of wire?’

  ‘Yes – next week, they think – maybe, but—’

  They were on the last or highest ridge, closing up behind the other two and crouching, looking down on a broad, white flood of surf and the heave of dark, jumbled sea beyond it. White foreground unbroken, uninterrupted. Remembering Marc’s reports of patrol boats based at Port Vendres, thirty kilometres down-coast there, southward: but then again, those lights in the hotel’s attics weren’t the only ones visible, there was a confusion of them here and there at different heights and in varying combinations. The felucca’s boat’s coxswain or officer would no doubt be familiar with that pair – or others elsewhere, such as Barcarès for instance – which was to the north of this place…

  ‘To the left there!’

  Sighting by Jake, who had binoculars. Dèclan shifting to see which way they were pointing: Rosie with a sense of surprise as well as excitement, as if at some miracle achieved. Jake again: ‘Felucca’s boat all right, I think. But – hang on…’

  In case it might be one of the craft out of Port Vendres, she guessed. Would hardly come close enough inshore to be visible in that obscurity, though. Jake was leaning back, passing the glasses to Déclan – who’d been a seaman of sorts at one time, she remembered. Engineer on a cross-Channel ferry-steamer? Jake pointing, shouting: ‘There. See it easily now—’

  So could Rosie. ‘Yes!’ Blossom of white in the darkness, and whiteness streaming: Déclan exclaiming, ‘Our bird, all right. Ship’s launch – wheel aft, cabin amidships – yeah, them’s ours!’ He added, giving Jake back the glasses, ‘Banging around like buggery, sick as dogs I bet.’

  Eight men to get ashore now, plus whatever gear. Rosie’s, anyway. Marc offering, to her surprise, ‘I’ll get your stuff, you stay dry. What is it, spare transceivers?’

  ‘Yes – thank you – two. You know what they look like.’

  Got over his sulks, she thought. Good for him. The boat was entering the surf-white area, its shape clearly visible – even to Marc with his eyes, she guessed. It wouldn’t, she thought, come much further in. These three were on their way down already and she was following them: they’d wade out presumably, help with the disembarkation, steadying the boat in the shallows there – where it now looked fairly huge, bigger than she’d expected, its flared bow seemingly towering over them as they reached it and closed in around it. A lot of shouting – French, otherwise indistinguishable over the general racket – and suddenly a dark flood of men over its forepart – not just the three there in the water now, but an expanding group of which they were the nucleus thickening in this direction, elongating itself shorewards and finally becoming a stream of individuals lurching this way in twos and threes through the surge of foam – and out there beyond them, the boat backing away stern-first.

  She herself was in up to her knees, she realised. Backing out of it: calling to the front-runners, ‘Bienvenus, messieurs!’ As if she belonged here, had any right to welcome them to their own damn country. But she had, damn it – was French, certainly felt it at this moment – a truly exciting moment, that sense of the near-miraculous still with her – all of this to be happening exactly as planned, and near enough perfect timing.

  Thanks largely to a bunch of crazy Poles out there, of course.

  ‘Take this one, Suzette?’ Marc with her transceivers. ‘I’ll bring the other. Both dry, you’ll be glad to hear.’ She’d got it, thanked him. Commandos hunched under enormous packs plodding up out of the wash of sea, dressed as far as she could make out like fishermen. One of them in close-up suddenly, gleam of white teeth in a dark, unshaven face, wool hat down to the level of his eyes: a growl of ‘Salut, mam’selle’; then Jake on her other side telling her, ‘Warmer in than out, would you believe it?’

  * * *

  ‘I did believe it. Had cold feet and then some. But could dry them and other items during the night, of course, and the commandos would have dry gear in their packs. There was this cabine behind the hotel – actually several, but this one owned by the hotel – by Madame Quétin – and used as summer accommodation for staff, I think – a timber shack, was all – and Jake had arranged to have it for the commandos’ use – it was where Déclan had parked his truck, and they didn’t have to go into the hotel itself – to change into dry gear, you see. They had a whole night’s journey ahead of them, no doubt could have endured it if they’d had to, but they did need to be reasonably fit at the end of it and four of them were going to be under the tarpaulin in the back of the truck, the way Loubert and his maquisards had travelled. You wouldn’t want to do that soaking wet, would you.’

  ‘What about Marc’s group?’

  ‘They didn’t get to change. He was only taking them to this safe-house near Narbonne, they could stick it that long – something like fifty kilometres I suppose – and change when they got there. Even luxuriate in nice hot tubs while the commandos were still crouched under Déclan’s tarp. They weren’t actually of very great concern to us – Marc was to deliver them to this place, boarding-house, whatever it was, and put them on a train in the morning. He had a load of fish in his van to confuse the issue if he happened to be stopped – but that never worried him much, you know, gendarmes all knowing him as they did.’

  ‘The BCRA agents would have been in ordinary street clothes, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. Overcoats and soft hats. Wettish, of course, otherwise just ordinary-looking. I scrounged some fish from Marc to take back to Berthe, I remember, put it in the Jorisse car and told Jake she’d love him for it. He said, “She loves me already. Don’t want to overdo it”, but then added when I’d commented on that ironic tone, Berthe being so valuable to us – and wholehearted, decent, I thought genuinely affectionate in her attitude to him – “I agree, Rosie, she’s a splendid woman and a tremendous asset to the réseau.” He could be a touch ruthless at times, you know. I suppose in fact he had to be – a necessary attribute for the job. But then again—’

  ‘Rosie—’

  ‘Yes, all right. Well – Marc took off, with those three. Jake’s instructions to him were that when he’d seen them on their way he was to hang around and concentrate on the beaches, the wire and all that, and get in touch promptly if and when there was reason to. Jake would be in touch with him when there was a decision about the felucca pick-up. He’d told him there’d be a pick-up, if beaches remained usable and there were no other felucca-type problems, i.e. bad news either from him or Baker Street.’

  I cut in with a question I’d meant to ask earlier, had she seen any dumps of wire herself, and she said she wasn’t sure. Might have, had an image of them in her mind but might only have visualised them, she and Jake having had the likely obstruction of the beaches very much in mind.

  ‘And on that subject – beach pick-up or no pick-up – Marc had asked him what the alternative would be, and the obvious answer was to get the “parcel” and its escorts over the mountains into Spain. Much, much easier over a beach into a boat, of course, beach being usable and felucca still around, but the Pyrenean crossing was a much-used route in which Marc in his escape-line role had been something of a specialist. Jake hadn’t told him anything about the “parcel” whom the commandos would be bringing out, only that there’d be one and that this in fact constituted the whole “object of the exercise”, to use the military terminology then prevalent. In fact in this brief exposition, conducted in shouts on their way down the beach ahead of me and Déclan, he’d been stalling Marc. Marc’s idea of a route out over the mountains would have been at this eastern end of the range, virtually where it abutted the coast. Whereas following the action at Noé there’d be a choice of other routes, one of which had already been selected for use by commandos escorting two of three anti-Nazi Germans they’d have got o
ut of Noé. The third, von Schleben, was to be brought down to this coast in Déclan’s truck with the commando CO, Commandant Marteneau, to a beach pick-up all of their own.’

  ‘Marc would have had no idea of any of that.’

  ‘None. Jake’s guiding principle – what you don’t need to know, best not to.’

  ‘That wasn’t a bad scheme though, was it – I mean, wouldn’t have been, but with the bonus now that if a beach pick-up wasn’t on, it’d be simple enough to send them all out over that mountain route?’

  ‘Precisely. Which was why Jake hadn’t been thrown, exactly, by the prospect of barbed wire and/or patrols, when Marc had come up with it. Alternative route already there, laid on for the others. Guides, Maquis rearguard, the lot – you’d simply switch those two to it. What you’d be losing of course would be the rather neat device of one group withdrawing in the obvious direction while a smaller one dodged off this way.’

  You could see the dodge working, too. Boches with their eyes on Noé from where there’s been an escape, and the obvious line of disengagement directly south or south-west into the mountains: and there is a move in that direction, with Maquis acting as rearguard to it. Why guess at there being a smaller party sneaking out as it were on the blind side?

  Old Rosie adding, ‘Jake discussed the possible change of plan with Déclan and Commandant Marteneau in the cabine while they were changing. I think Marteneau already knew the beach might not be usable. If they could use it they would, but there had to be a deadline for the decision – Tuesday or Wednesday, say. I don’t remember exactly, but we can work that out. For me, though, what it came down to was I’d have to be listening-out on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, maybe even Thursday – Friday too if there were any serious complications – and everything of course dependent on a successful outcome at Noé. This meant I’d have to do at least some of it from Place Marengo. Not necessarily fatal, by any means, Jake had rightly been ultra-cautious after the transmission from the tower, but a single blip even three nights running wasn’t necessarily going to bring the swine hotfoot to Berthe’s door.’

  ‘If you had to transmit – if Jake got beach news from Marc for instance—’

  ‘Get out to one of my pre-stashed transceivers by bike. Thing was, I’d likely be on my own – Jake wanting to be in close touch with Déclan pretty well up to the last minute. I might warn you, incidentally, I don’t know a heck of a lot about that end of it.’

  ‘So we’ll stick to your end. Which is what primarily concerns us anyway. Tell me though, Rosie – did you happen to see some rather delicious-looking soles going past a minute or two ago?’

  ‘Well, by sheer coincidence—’

  ‘Place is looking up. Think a couple of those and a bottle of Sancerre might hit the spot?’

  ‘You know darn well it would!’

  15

  Voreux asked his front-seat passenger – unlikely-looking character, BCRA field-name Gérone – ‘See this? Here, my side?’ On the left as they drove north on the narrow road which in some recent southerly gale had become strewn with beach, shingle which from time to time crashed and rattled under the body of the van. Gérone asking him somewhat disinterestedly what he was supposed to have seen and was now somewhere astern: Marc told him, ‘Barbed wire, great stack of it, similar dump every half-kilometre. In a matter of days they’ll have it set up and the beaches won’t be usable. I’ve warned my colleagues but they’re still reckoning on a pick-up by felucca – probably not the one you came in, I imagine—’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well – suppose the pick-up’s in a week or ten days’ time. I mean, they’ve just landed, got to have time to draw breath and suss the job out, so forth?’

  ‘You could be right. No idea. Certainly the Pole wouldn’t want to hang around out there more than a day or two. He’s jumpy even now. How long has the wire been there?’

  ‘A few days. Needs posts, I’m told – iron supports to hold it. Local fishermen, men I deal with, say otherwise the force of the waves and shifting shingle—’

  ‘May not have it in place all that soon, then.’

  ‘The Boche doesn’t usually leave things half done for long, does he? In fact when I first saw it I thought they’d got wind of you being on the way. Incidentally, d’you know who or what the soldier-boys’ll be bringing out – or where from?’

  Wincing in reaction to a crashing of stones under the sump, and edging over to the wrong side of the narrow road, that lot having been flung up out of the declivity on the right. A cracked sump would not be convenient here and now. He’d eased his foot off the accelerator slightly: glancing then at his passenger’s rather large grey head – only a shadow now, but earlier he’d seen him and the others in the light, knew him to be tallish, scrawny, middle-aged with a sharp nose and an Adam’s apple – hardly a type one would have expected to come wading ashore in the middle of the night.

  ‘What did you ask me then?’

  ‘Only wondered if you’d any idea what those guys are here for.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘My brief was simply to meet you and your friends. But I’d have thought that after several days on a felucca with them—’

  ‘They weren’t talking to us about it, and we weren’t asking. Being sick, most of the time, as it happens. But if your own colleagues keep it to themselves, presumably that’s how it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘My Chef de Réseau is cagey in the extreme. Fair enough – has his reasons, I dare say. But it’s not every night one gets half-drowned without knowing what for, uh?’

  ‘At least you’re young, and in dry trousers. I’m still frozen – and where it matters. Bit much for a man not exactly in his first youth, eh?’

  Marc had changed out of his wet things in the hotel. He’d left trousers, socks and shoes ready to shift into and had done it in about two and a half minutes while his passengers had been installing themselves in the van; had then found time to embrace Madame Quétin and ask her to tell the nieces he’d call by soon, had been disappointed they weren’t around. Sunday, of course, just hadn’t thought… In fact making efforts to sound casual, relaxed, which he certainly had not been feeling. And dashing out then, he’d found this old turd in the cab instead of in the back behind the fish-box partition with the others. He’d intended putting all three of them in there, but this one had stated flatly that he preferred to see where he was going – implication being that what he preferred, he got – and the others, names Basan and Lallande, had been in favour of it since it gave them more space for themselves, would make it possible for them to get out of their own wet gear en route.

  Rosie had been there to wave Marc goodbye. She and Jake had seen Déclan and the commandos on their way, Jake had then gone into the hotel for a word with Madame Quétin about accommodating some of them – a meal for half a dozen men, say – in the early hours of Friday, and she’d heard Marc’s slight altercation with the grey-haired BCRA agent. She herself staying out of it – Marc’s van, Marc’s business, at any rate not hers, and the BCRA man anyway taking no notice of her at all. She’d gone round to Marc’s side though, tapped on the window and when he slid it down wished him good luck. He’d acknowledged this, wiping the window with his sleeve, asked her, ‘When do we meet next, d’you suppose?’

  ‘No idea.’ A smile. ‘But I’ll look forward to it.’

  ‘According to the dictates of our lord and master, of course. Who’s as busy as ever not letting the left hand know what the right hand doeth – huh?’

  ‘Happens to suit me very well – as I’ve mentioned a few times. Anyway here he is.’

  Jake joining them at that moment, asking, ‘Front-seat passenger, Marc?’

  A shrug. ‘He insists, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t think you should do the insisting?’

  ‘Sooner just get going – get as far as I can before curfew.’ Jerk of a thumb towards the rear: ‘All shut up inside now, and—’

  ‘All right, Mar
c. Good luck.’

  * * *

  Old Rosie told me, when I was pouring the Sancerre, ‘Went something like that. Jake was never one for laying down the law – unless he absolutely had to. Anyway Marc drove off, and how the trip went from there on until he got to his so-called safe-house – I got to know much, much later what transpired then—’

  ‘You say so-called safe-house?’

  ‘Yes.’ Touching the stem of her wine-glass. ‘Turned out to be more of what we used to call a souricière. Remember those?’

  Souricière meaning mouse-trap. More realistically, might say ‘agent-trap’. She’d come close to one or two in her later deployments, but luckily for her managed to stay out of them. I toasted her: ‘Blessings, Rosie.’

  ‘And to you.’ Then: ‘Oh, yummy…’

  * * *

  Marc shifted gear again, suggested to Gérone, ‘You could get into dry pants anyway, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ll bear it. I have rather long legs – as you may have noticed. Also one’s clothes may dry on one, to some extent.’

  Might have been a schoolmaster, with that authoritative, confident way of speaking, Marc thought. Forking left off the coast road, at last.

  ‘An end to the damn shingle, anyway. I was getting scared for the sump, I can tell you.’

  ‘Yes, occurred to me too. Heading for Saises-le-Château now, huh?’

  ‘You know the district?’

  ‘I should say I do. Why, when I was a boy I used to paddle in the étangs down here. Caught a fish in a straw hat once.’ A bark of laughter and a scooping motion in the dark. ‘I mean like so! Not a fish in a hat.’ More chuckles: Marc with other things on his mind, less easily amused. Gérone then adding, ‘As it happens I’m from Narbonne, to which metropolis you’re so kindly taking us.’

  ‘The others aren’t from around here, though.’

  ‘No. Basan’s a Parisian – as you are, uh? – and the little fellow, Lallande – ill-mannered brute – is from Marseille. Is this safe-house you’re taking us to actually in Narbonne?’