The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  As he kicked the motorcycle’s starter to life, he gave the dispatch rider’s body a last glance.

  They’d become quite friendly, the two of them. Harald … the boy’s name had been Harald.

  Damas knew they were living on borrowed time. Wunsch would soon discover that his night watchman hadn’t gone home at the break of day.

  Angered by the thought of having to wait, he asked Theissen to contact the Baron Dieter Karl Hunter.

  The Untersturmführer nodded grimly to his wireless operator. There was so much military traffic, the airwaves would be jammed. Hen scratchings were coming in from everywhere, but then Berlin was replying.

  The operator whipped off the earphones. “Eindhoven, Herr Untersturmführer. The baron and the Gestapo Krantz left for there at dawn.”

  The Dornier tipped its wings and raced its engines. Not one to panic easily, Krantz sat in the pitch-dark belly of the plane with his feet and back braced against the struts. The whole fuselage shook. Rivets rattled. The aluminum was freezing. Air leaked in through the bomb doors, mercilessly flapping the legs of his trousers. One mistake, that was all it would take, and it was goodbye Berlin, goodbye Heydrich and everything else as the pilot, more used to bombing runs, opened the doors.

  Silent like himself, Hunter sat opposite him. Heydrich hadn’t been kind to the baron. Gott in Himmel, no! Far from it. Himself as well.

  Suddenly a shrill voice came over the intercom. “Two o’clock and high.” Jesus Christ, what the hell was going on out there?

  Holes pierced the fuselage. The staccato chatter of the MG-15s began. The engines labored, screamed, faltered and screamed again as the wings dipped and shreds of metal were sprayed all over the place.

  The Dornier lurched, lifted, then dropped like a stone, only to rise suddenly as the gun in the lower part of the cockpit began to fire.

  Again the enemy fighter came at them. Was it Dutch, British, French or Belgian?

  The thing cut a swath across the fuselage, killing the lower gunner to the shrieks of the others and opening a fist-sized hole not far from Hunter’s foot.

  The nose of the Dornier pitched downward. The engines raced. There was more firing, thicker, heavier. Krantz ducked, cringed, ducked again, only to hear the crew cheering as the nose came up and he was flung back, had to hang on for dear life as the engines roared and the aircraft threatened to shake itself to pieces.

  Then someone was shouting, “Rotterdam! Jesus, you guys should see it!” and he knew they’d made a small detour from their flight plan.

  The Dornier banked away from the city and began rapidly to lose altitude.

  At the airfield outside of Eindhoven a lone Stuka headed west toward Antwerp and the Scheldt. Grateful for the ground underfoot, Krantz found his cigarettes but didn’t dare light one. The smell of high-octane fuel was far too overpowering.

  “Well, Baron, what now? So Holland has fallen. Just how the hell do you propose to get to Antwerp?”

  Hunter’s dark eyes followed the rapidly disappearing Stuka. “We will do the impossible because we must.”

  Richard could be out there for all he knew. The diamonds were still on the docks. No British destroyers had been sighted as yet.

  Heydrich had thrown himself into a violent rage at the news of Richard’s escape and had threatened to have them both shot.

  When their wireless operator got through to Theissen, Hunter told him to ask them to watch for the Stuka. “If it makes a pass directly over the fabricating shop, then they are to attack at once. Otherwise, they are to wait until the city is about to fall. We will be there by then with reinforcements.”

  For an hour now the birds had been singing. Wunsch found the experience both touching and profound. The haze that hung over the city had taken on the tint of old gray paint to which long threads of ugly black smoke still gave their contribution. On the horizon to the east the sun was rimmed with fire, yet it couldn’t break through the haze. Miraculously a flight of gulls circled on a hidden eddy, looking more like phantoms bent on urgent business but uncertain of which direction to take.

  Then the songbirds all shut up—just like that, and he craned his neck out of the apartment window, anxious now, robbed by the loss of their songs.

  The high-pitched whine of a single Stuka came to him from out over the harbor. The thing made a run of the estuary, disappearing swiftly to the northwest before returning to bank eastward and climb back into the sky.

  It hadn’t dropped its bombs. Was it a pathfinder, a reconnaissance flight—the precursor of things to come?

  After so much, it was eerie to hear the birds begin to sing again. It reminded him of the shelling during the last war. Dead silence after the bombardment of heavy guns, and then, miraculously, the sound of birds.

  “Martine, it’s too quiet. Something is wrong. The city appears deserted.”

  Had it come to pass so suddenly? One moment British and French troops side by side with their own at last, the next, a general evacuation.

  “I must find Lev and go down to the harbor. Perhaps something will turn up.”

  A last desperate measure.

  She came through from the kitchen. “Have your breakfast first, Bernard. Please, at least a cup of coffee. They are bombing Rotterdam. It is savage what they are doing to that city.”

  “Then we have gained but a moment’s peace at the expense of others.”

  From the vent in the roof of the fabricating shop, Damas watched the Stuka disappear on the horizon and knew they must somehow get through another day. The watchman’s family were bound to come looking for him, but with the confusion, anything could have happened to the man.

  Theissen had had the body dumped in the river, but why had the watchman suddenly decided to check the loft? Had that girl they’d seen had anything to do with it? So like Arlette Huysmans, and yet that could not be possible. Or could it?

  It was an uneasy thought that lingered. The detail guarding the diamonds were having their morning coffee. The sergeant was discussing things with his captain. A few stragglers, portents of the throngs to come, roamed the quays in search of passage. The sergeant pointed down the length of the dock toward the fabricating shop, then swung his arm in a loop to pick out the highest of the rooftops.

  Damas climbed down from the vent to make his way silently among the men. When he reached their wireless operator, he wrote something on a pad and Cecile Verheyden saw him do this. Asking for a cigarette, she filled her lungs with smoke and waited. The wireless operator looked to Theissen for the okay—always there was this chain of command that had to be obeyed.

  “Arlette Huysmans,” whispered Damas. “It’s just a thought. Perhaps Krantz or the baron know something we don’t.”

  Arlette alive? Had Duncan lied to Richard? Sickened by the thought, Cecile found her eyes moistening. She mustn’t betray herself. She must be brave. Richard had been the one great reason she’d contacted Duncan McPherson, not feelings for her country, her home, though those had been a part of it.

  They’d kill Arlette if she was alive and back in the city. They’d kill Richard, too.

  Halfway between her and Damas, their explosives expert had just put the finishing touches to the suitcase bomb that contained a good thirty kilos of explosives and a timer.

  It was all to be so simple. Damas and she would take the suitcase and join the throngs of milling refugees. Theissen and his men, in two stolen Belgian army trucks, would make a rush for the diamonds after the suitcase bomb had gone off.

  They’d load the diamonds onto the trucks and cross under the river to the other side. The traffic tunnel was being kept open and free of refugees by the army. They’d be waved on through, would hide the trucks and the diamonds in some warehouse and wait for the city to fall.

  Damas noticed her watching them. Somehow the woman had managed to keep herself reasonably tidy in spite of the days of captivity. He wondered what the baron would do to her if she survived the next twenty-four hours. He wondered what she’
d say to Hunter about what had happened to her at the farm.

  The Stuka had landed at Eindhoven, the baron and the Gestapo Krantz had set up a temporary command post there.

  Damas had the idea that the Verheyden woman would keep that little episode to herself.

  And Arlette Huysmans? he asked. Krantz had ordered him to check the girl’s former contacts. The Club Chez Vous could be ruled out for the present. The offices of Dillingham and Company would have to be looked into; he still had a set of keys, but unfortunately they were at his flat and probably by now in the hands of the Belgian police.

  That would leave the flats of Bernard Wunsch—the girl could easily have stayed with them again, but surely Wunsch would have shown signs of this?

  And the Jew, Levinski? he asked himself.

  A possibility, as was the girl’s former landlady.

  Dismayed by what lay ahead of her, Arlette packed the wireless set away.

  London had replied that the promised destroyers were elsewhere engaged but that they would do all they could to reach the diamonds.

  Somehow she had to warn de Heer Wunsch and the Belgian captain that Damas had a squad of men hiding in the loft of the fabricating shop.

  The schoolmaster would be watching for just such a thing. He’d try to stop her.

  As she went up to the roof to take down the aerial, Arlette thought back to the brief hours before dawn and the expression on Madame Hausemer’s face.

  Standing under the glare of that good woman’s hall light, she had said, “Madame, you must forgive me, but I have nowhere else to turn.”

  She mustn’t stay any longer than she absolutely had to. If the city should fall, the Germans would want to question the woman.

  Duncan would come—he must! Damas might have moved his men again. The watchman’s body? she wondered. Would that have caused them to leave?

  A faint hope she knew she couldn’t count on.

  Then she must go to the diamonds at once and ask the Belgian captain to let her have some men. She would kill Damas—stop them before they left the loft.

  Richard … Richard would have wanted her to do this. Dear God, why could he not have lived?

  The Sielbex was a tour boat that had seen better days. Moored to two barges, she lay along the bank of the Scheldt near the lighthouse beacon at the tiny village of Bath.

  Hagen couldn’t believe his luck. He’d been to Cecile’s farm, had changed his clothes—found things of Dieter’s—and had hidden Heydrich’s dossiers and the Red Cross labels from the parcels.

  Armed with a Schmeisser in his rucksack and a pistol, he had crossed and recrossed the Albert Canal at night, had gone through first the German lines and then the Belgian.

  And now here he was, fifteen or so kilometers downstream of the port of Antwerp.

  It was early in the morning of May 15. With skies that could be filled with German planes at any moment, it would be suicidal to attempt to move the diamonds in broad daylight. But were they still in Antwerp? Would there still be time to wait until darkness? Would that possibility even occur?

  The boat rocked gently as he stepped aboard. The aroma of coffee came to him as he quietly opened the wheelhouse door.

  “So, my friend, have you come to steal my boat?”

  Hagen felt the muzzle of a single-barreled shotgun as it was pressed into the small of his back.

  Leo Ooms was normally a humble giant, a man in his late sixties with drooping jowls and sad, baggy eyes, little hair and often a grin. A Zeelander who was used to people trying to steal his boat.

  Walter Vreeken—the man who held the coffeepot in one hand and a shotgun in the other—was his second in command. Thin, tall, glazed by a life on the river and in its brothels and pubs, it was Vreeken who said, “The rucksack, my friend. Gently.”

  “Interesting,” snorted Ooms when the Schmeisser was exposed, along with spare clips of ammunition and a half dozen stick grenades. “Just who are you?”

  They’d heard all about the Nazi Fifth Column in Belgium, all about German parachutists in the guise of priests and nuns. They were glad they’d caught one of them.

  “Look, my name’s Hagen. I’m a diamond salesman who escaped from Germany.”

  Vreeken lifted the thin arch of his eyebrows in mock surprise before displaying in a wolfish grin the set of false teeth that had given him trouble for years. “Next thing you know, Leo, he’ll be telling us he’s Hitler.”

  His hands held high, Hagen said, “Why not make a telephone call for me? You do the talking.”

  “The lines are down. You bastards cut them.”

  As calmly as he could, Hagen began to tell them of the diamonds.

  No, they hadn’t seen any British destroyers. Yes, they’d seen lots of German airplanes. “They can bomb hell out of the diamonds for all we care, Mijnheer Hagen. We’re taking you in.”

  But it meant leaving the boat, and that, neither of them was prepared to do. When Vreeken’s grandson appeared with a wicker basket, they decided to have their breakfast and think about it. “War can’t be fought on an empty stomach,” commented Ooms dryly. “We will send young Rudi here with a message for the constable, yes?”

  Yes, that was what they’d do. Never mind the invasion, never mind the diamonds. First the herrings and hard-boiled eggs, the bread and blackberry jam, and then another mug of coffee with lots of sugar and cream.

  “But you must listen to me. I have a wireless set. I’ve been in contact with London. The destroyers will come, but they are being engaged elsewhere. Off Rotterdam perhaps. I … I don’t really know.”

  “And this supposed squad of men?” asked the Belgian captain in charge of the detail guarding the diamonds.

  “Waiting down there.” She pointed angrily. “In the loft of Dillingham’s fabricating shop.”

  “She could be right, sir,” said the sergeant. He didn’t like it one bit. The crowds of civilians, the rooftops of the warehouses …

  “I can’t spare the men. You’ll just have to wait until I’ve contacted HQ and asked for reinforcements.”

  Arlette knew it was useless to try. Turning from him, she looked along the quays toward the fabricating shop, which was all but lost among the distant warehouses. “They will come for the diamonds. They will have seen me talking to you.”

  As the sergeant watched, the girl with the lovely brown eyes quickly lost herself in the crowd.

  Lieutenant Gort Kloostermann had had just about enough. Assigned with far too few men to guard the electrical power facility at Merksem and the Kruisschans Lock, which together controlled the port of Antwerp, he didn’t want to hear about two bumboat captains who had caught a Nazi infiltrator. But when the village cop from Bath mentioned the Antwerp diamond stocks, he changed his mind.

  “Hagen … he says his name is Richard Hagen.”

  HQ Antwerp got through to the captain of the detail guarding the diamonds.

  There’d been no sign of the promised destroyers. No hope of getting the diamonds out of Antwerp by sea.

  They were going to load them onto trucks. If the army could let them have the use of two of them, they’d take what they could and try to make for one of the channel ports.

  “Hagen?” said the captain, shouting to be heard. The docks were being inundated again. Streams of people.

  “Hagen?” asked a harried Bernard Wunsch, who had only just arrived. “Not Richard Hagen?”

  The captain thrust the field telephone at Wunsch and told him to take care of it.

  The offices of Dillingham and Company were empty. Dismayed by the futility of trying to get anyone to listen to her, Arlette made her way through to the cutting shop.

  Lev was tidying up, fussing over the relics of a lifetime’s work. There was no one else around.

  “Lev … Lev, it’s me.”

  Tears sprang into the diamond cutter’s eyes. With difficulty, he tried to find his voice.

  “The diamonds, Lev. There’s a Nazi raiding party hiding in the loft of our fabri
cating shop.”

  “Arlette …?” He couldn’t seem to move. She stood in the doorway looking at him as she’d so often done in the past and yet … “Arlette, is it really you?”

  They came together, he throwing his arms about the girl and holding her tightly, she saying, “Lev … Lev, where is de Heer Wunsch? I must speak to him.”

  “The docks, where else?”

  Both of them ran from the building to catch an already crowded tramcar and join the throngs that were heading for the docks.

  At 1147 hours Damas noticed activity on the quay beside the Megadan. A dark blue, half-ton Ford truck with an open back was being hurriedly loaded with strongboxes.

  Men were clearing the road of refugees. People were being forced back. The road ran from the diamonds toward him along the quays before turning out of sight toward the river.

  Two sets of docks lay between them and the Scheldt. Perhaps a distance of a kilometer. No more.

  They would have to attack. “Notify Eindhoven that the diamonds are being moved. The British must have sent a ship to take them off.”

  When he reached for the suitcase, Cecile Verheyden knew she’d have to accompany him. Was she about to die? Five minutes, ten … would it be ten the timer would allow? Or seconds?

  Piles of possessions of every imaginable kind were heaped among the thousands of refugees who milled about the docks. There were cars with mattresses tied on top, baby carriages stuffed to the limit.

  Damas clutched the handle of the suitcase. Her arm was gripped at the elbow. He’d kill her if she said anything, kill her if she tried to run away.

  Bernard Wunsch saw them detach themselves from some refugees but then the crowd closed about them again.

  When next he saw them, the Verheyden woman was between the priest and the sandbags. The priest set his suitcase down beside one of the machine guns and reached inside his suit jacket for his papers. The Verheyden woman started to say something …

  “Sergeant!” shouted Wunsch. “Stop that couple!”

  Dragging her after him, Damas darted into the crowd, the Verheyden woman looking back, crying out now—shrieking, “The suitcase, Mijnheer Wunsch! The suitcase!”