The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  Two Belgian army trucks were approaching. As they crept through the crowd, their drivers leaned repeatedly on the horns and shook their fists at the refugees.

  The air-raid sirens started up again. Suddenly the milling crowd panicked to take cover. Freed of them, the Belgian soldiers were getting down from the trucks to quickly fan out across the road and the tracks. Their weapons … what was it about their weapons? Not Belgian … not Belgian … “Captain, that suitcase!”

  A sheet of flame burst in front of Wunsch. Blood rushed into his eyes, his nose and ears as he was flung into the water. The half-ton was upended. The strongboxes it had contained were tossed about, some to split open and spew their diamonds into the blood, the bits of flesh, an arm, a leg, a hand as the sound of gunfire caught them up.

  Out on the water and just downriver from them, Hagen heard the explosion, then the pop-popping of small-arms fire and the staccato chatter of machine guns.

  “Can’t this thing go any faster?” he shouted.

  Leo Ooms gripped the wheel in one hand and pointed to the plume of smoke that had risen from among the docks. “Cut one of the barges loose,” he shouted back. “Toss some of your men overboard.”

  The diamonds had been given priority one. Now a dozen Belgian marines had joined them. Two of the men manned the machine gun in the bow; another two had set up their gun on top of the deckhouse. But the barges, the drag they caused … “This old engine,” said Ooms. “If it does nothing else, my friend, let us hope it gets us there at all.”

  His partner banged his gums in dismay. Knowing there’d be trouble, Walter Vreeken had removed his false teeth and had put them safely away in his locker. Armed with the shotgun, and holding Leo’s gun in the crook of his left arm, he watched the quays along the river, hoping that they’d somehow get out of this alive.

  Running, barging through the crowd, Arlette heard the scream of the dive-bombers overhead. The crash of a bomb came, then the pull-out as the plane tore itself up from the river. She’d left Lev far behind her, had to get to the Megadan, had to help them.

  When she reached the Kempischdok, she began to thread her way among the warehouses. Sniper fire was pinning the Belgians down. Again and again she heard the shots as the firing around the diamonds became more ragged.

  There were even brief moments of silence, of consternation, of hunting the skies and the rooftops. Then the Stukas would come in again and the whole mad rush of cannon shells would start up once more to trickle off in machine-gun and small-arms fire.

  She searched the rooftops of the warehouses. People stared at her. People wondered why she stood out like that, so exposed and with a gun in her hand.

  When she found the source of the sniper fire, she found the iron ladder and went up it.

  Dieter Karl Hunter had the Stuka’s pilot fly him over the area again. Things were not going well. They were meeting more resistance than expected. Caught on the wharf, the Belgians were putting up a stiff fight in spite of everything.

  “Make a run of the estuary, then return to base for more bombs.”

  Splitting off from the squadron, they flew northwest along great, sweeping meanders whose marshes, islands and poldered shores opened out before them.

  When they saw the destroyers entering the estuary, Hunter told the pilot to notify Eindhoven and ask for reinforcements.

  When they flew in over the river again, they caught the tour boat and its barges and raked them with fire until the guns were empty.

  Splintered wood, glass, blood and smoke filled the tiny wheelhouse of the tour boat. Hagen tore Ooms’s hands from the wheel and stepped over the body. The Stuka had made one hell of a mess, had killed or wounded half the men. The forward machine-gun crew were still okay; the men on the roof hadn’t had a chance.

  An arm hung over the shattered windscreen in front of him. Blood dripped from the fingers. The wristwatch kept on ticking. It was after one o’clock now. An hour … ? Had it really been an hour since he’d heard the first explosion?

  “Snipers … on top of that warehouse.”

  The burly Belgian marine shouldered his way into the wheelhouse. “Take cover, mijnheer. They’ll have seen us.”

  Arlette crept across the roof toward the rusty shed on which the two men had positioned themselves.

  The sharp, flat report of one of their telescopic rifles came. First one would shoot and then the other with ruthless determination.

  As the Stukas flew away she heard the sound of distant artillery and knew that the Allies must be falling back again. Soon streams of Belgian soldiers would enter the city to take up their final positions.

  Out on the water a badly hit tour boat with two barges was trying to reach the quay where some of the strongboxes were now piled.

  Choosing her moment, she ran across the roof at a crouch, to throw her back against the wall of the shed. Then she started up the short iron ladder that would lead to the roof.

  The two of them, spread-eagled on the corrugated iron, lay at the far corners. Each man had a satchel beside him. On this was a pile of cartridges that glistened in the sun.

  Arlette heard them talking quietly to each other. Apparently their commander, the Untersturmführer Theissen, was gathering his men for a final rush. It was now or never.

  Arlette crept up the last few rungs and when she was standing on the roof, she said, “Hey, you two!” and shot them both. The first in the face, the second in the chest.

  Two shots. Only two.

  Then she lay down in one of their places and calmly took up his rifle.

  Theissen was the first man she shot. Then his second in command. One by one she began to pick off the others until, realizing what had happened, they took cover.

  The diamonds began to move from the quay to the riverside. The tour boat and its barges had docked. There was still lots of firing, lots of fighting.

  She found another man, their wireless operator. He was hidden behind one of the trucks. Only a leg was showing.

  The cross hairs settled on it, the man was flung over onto his stomach to stare beneath the truck and wonder what had happened. She shot him in the face, and began to hunt the warehouses again.

  Racing to load the diamonds, Hagen knew only that a small miracle had happened. Someone had given them breathing space.

  Word came that the destroyers had entered the estuary. A tugboat was heading upriver to them to replace the shattered tour boat.

  As the sound of the Stukas returned, someone handed him a pair of binoculars. Angular against the eastern sky, the Stukas rushed towards them. And on the roof of that warehouse one lone speck had pinned the Germans down.

  It was a girl with short-cut, dark brown hair and a beret.

  Hagen lowered the glasses. Lost in thought, he didn’t hear the cry to take cover.

  Then the Stukas descended and it all began again.

  “Bernard … Bernard, can you hear me?”

  The chatter of machine-gun fire, the stench of cordite. Water … water in the shell craters, mud everywhere. Rain … had it been raining? Flanders, 1914 … or was it 1915? No, it was 1918. Yes … yes, it must be.

  Wunsch tried to open his eyes. Sand … the sandbags had been split apart. There was sand under his legs. Cobblestones … the torn-up iron of railway tracks.

  Again the sound of machine-gun fire came to him but louder this time, heavier, more persistent.

  Out over the river, a Messerschmitt had joined the Stukas.

  He shut his eyes and lost consciousness.

  Later there was sporadic firing. Single shots, the crump of mortar shells, but still the whine of the Stukas.

  “Bernard, Arlette’s alive! I’ve seen her.”

  “Lev …” Wunsch wet his throat. The pain in his chest wouldn’t go away. Blood … had he lost his hands? “Lev, the diamonds,” he gasped.

  “Out on the river, Bernard. On two barges.”

  “Richard …?” asked Wunsch, only to pass out again.

  The Stuka clim
bed, the sound of its engines dwindling as it flew high above the tidal flats of the Oosterscheldt before banking.

  Hagen waited tensely. The barges were connected to the tour boat by a hawser. The Germans had sunk the tugboat that had been sent to take over.

  The sound of the Stuka’s engines ceased, and for a moment he was thrown back to the airfield at the Heinkel factory on the Baltic, to Dieter and the Krupp.

  The thing seemed to hang up there, to remain motionless. Then it started down, came hurtling at them!

  Hunter watched from the rear gunner’s cockpit behind the pilot. As the tour boat and the diamonds came closer and closer, men fired at them and he saw Richard standing out on the deck. Defiant always, a rifle in his hands.

  The plane lifted with a lurch as the bombs fell away and the scream of its siren came to him. Then they were climbing back up into the sky again, and he was straining to look back to see what had happened.

  The tour boat had gone down. The barges had been cut adrift.

  “Go back. Machine-gun those who are in the water.”

  “I have my orders, Baron. We are to return to base to attack the destroyers.”

  “Go back! One pass.”

  Perhaps it was the tone of voice, perhaps the fact that the baron had a close association with the Gestapo Krantz.

  Horst Ungermann lifted the Stuka’s nose before banking in a wide turn that would bring them in over the river again. The Belgian AA batteries opened up. The Stuka dived. His wing guns began to fire. Splash points raced across the water, killing the men, catching them as they struggled to get away. “Richard … Richard,” shouted Hunter. “Kill him! You must kill him!”

  The barges drifted aimlessly downstream, the diamonds under canvas. No one was with them. No one. Eight tons of diamonds. Eight tons …

  “Baron, we must go back.”

  Only bodies floated where men had once swam. Richard would have been killed instantly.

  Suddenly exhausted, Hunter slumped back in the seat and didn’t reply.

  Watched helplessly from the quays by men who had raced to rescue them, the barges continued to drift. In time they reached a point opposite the lighthouse at Bath but fetched up against an island on the far side of the shipping channel. As Belgian marines clambered aboard a pilot boat, gulls came to watch. The lead barge had wedged itself in the mud; the trailing one now tugged at it, a contest of wills.

  There’d not be time; the Stukas would come back.

  Downstream some forty miles, an anxious Duncan McPherson searched the skies. Even at a speed of twenty knots an hour—far too fast for a crowded channel—it would take the destroyers Halifax and Torbay a good two hours to reach the port of Antwerp. Would the diamonds still be there? Would they be able to take them off?

  “I pray to God we have the cover of darkness, Captain. Och, it’s a fool’s notion to wish for it.”

  At 1532 hours the rusty hulk of an East Indian freighter stood oddly out in midchannel, stern down and sinking. Abandoned with its deckhouse and hold in flames.

  Off Hansweert and the canal that linked the Scheldt estuary to that of the Oosterscheldt there was more wreckage, drifting bodies, the roof of a Ford sedan that had been driven off a pier in haste, another motor car that had been hit by cannon shells. Milling villagers, farmers still stunned by what had happened and standing out in their fields. Fishermen watching the skies.

  The life preserver from a ship, a drift of oil slick and splintered boards …

  McPherson knew it was hopeless. The Stukas would come back and with them would be a squadron of Messerschmitts.

  At 1650 hours someone nudged his arm—a midshipman. “Message received, sir. Reads: Diamonds on two barges. Last seen drifting off Antwerp. Believe will be taken in tow by Belgian marines. Xavier.”

  Arlette Huysmans … Odette Latour.

  McPherson felt his throat tighten. He had wronged the girl, had wronged Richard …

  When the midshipman asked if there was any reply, he shook his head. “She’ll have shut down the set and beat it, if I know that one.”

  The Stukas came back as the sun was in the west, but by then he had the barges in sight and the destroyers had hoved to in the center of the channel. Sitting ducks. “Oh Jesus,” he said, “we’re for it now.”

  They came in waves, five Stukas first, diving from the heights to release their bombs but followed swiftly by ME-109s that came in low to savagely rake the decks and meet the hail of antiaircraft fire.

  As the barges came abreast of them, McPherson tried to shout above the din of the guns. Men raced to throw the boarding ladders over the side. The barges were secured. Someone cut the pilot boat free and it started out, the Belgian marines taking cover as best they could.

  A Stuka screamed. Exploding as it pitched into the river, the plane threw its spinning wreckage at the pilot boat. All around them now there was fire, the smoke and clamor of battle. McPherson found himself straining on a hawser, lending a hand to load the strongboxes. One cargo net and then another—again a Stuka, now an ME-109 …

  As the last shell casing spat from one of the deck guns, the skies cleared and the long twilight began.

  The Halifax was being turned around. The Torbay had been sunk, a direct hit, the Stuka having never pulled out of its dive.

  Survivors were being picked up. The diamonds were being stacked forward to be taken down into the hold.

  “Sir, Captain reports ship under way.”

  “Tell him to pick up as many of the Torbay’s crew as possible. Have Sparks send this to the prime minister: Diamonds secured, now in transit.”

  The sound of kettledrums came up from the street below the office, that and the clip-clopping of countless hooves and the tramp of soldiers’ boots.

  Wunsch ached as he’d never ached before. All the hair had been singed from his face. His head was swathed in bandages. His eyes had been blackened. The right arm was in a sling—broken in three places by the blast, the collarbone, too, and three ribs. A chunk of shrapnel had taken the lobe off his left ear, death missing him by a hairbreath.

  The diamonds … there’d been a terrible battle for them, but they’d got them safely off to England. They’d be in London by now, thank God.

  Somehow he’d been fished from the river but had lost consciousness so many times he could remember little.

  And now, a city on its knees.

  “Lev, you cannot do this thing.”

  “Bernard, it’s the only way. Will you and Martine help us?”

  What could he say? “But of course, my friend. Lev, the Germans, they cannot possibly want to—”

  “What, Bernard? Round up every Jew? I’m not thinking of that, but of my value to them as a cutter and my apparent interest in their Red Cross parcels. It was one thing for us to supply them for as long as we did. It’s another for me to work under them. They know me at the Red Cross depot. What else need I say? Besides, there is my Anna to think of. They might try to separate us, Bernard, and I can’t have that.”

  “But the loft above the fabricating shop? What if they should decide to look there or wish to store things?”

  None of them could predict what would happen.

  Lev was stubborn. “They won’t find us because I’ll build a secret room. Believe me, Bernard, this will be best. At least until we see how things go. Look, if it was good enough for German parachutists, then it’s good enough for me. Besides, they won’t think to look there, having used it themselves.”

  Already the Nazis had run up their swastikas above the Central Railway Station and all other important buildings. They’d commandeered the De Keyser Hotel, the Waldorf, the Empire and the Metropole. They’d taken over the National Bank, the wireless broadcasting station, telephones—everything.

  Even the town hall.

  Antwerp’s citizens were to present themselves at the Kommandantur to apply for the necessary residence papers. Lev and Anna would be singled out—Wunsch knew this. “Tell me what you need and we’ll w
ork out a system for getting it to you. There are some old boards in the shop yard. Nails … you will need old ones, Lev, so as to make the partition appear as if built long ago.”

  “A false ceiling, Bernard. I’ve already thought about it. Anna’s waiting there for me.”

  Had it come to this so soon? They’d need water, food, spare clothing—how would they do their laundry, their cooking? The many everyday things one had taken so much for granted?

  To live like fugitives, to be hounded down—was that how it would be?

  He didn’t know.

  “I will walk a ways with you, Lev. It’s better if there are two of us. Then if we are stopped, I can say we are simply going to the fabricating shop.”

  Lev shook his head. “Come only after dark and watch out. That schoolmaster may still be interested in us. Richard and Arlette … the Nazis will want them, Bernard. Me, I only hope they’ve managed to get away.”

  Arlette had gone into hiding—where he didn’t know.

  And Richard? Wunsch asked himself. Apparently she’d not met up with him, couldn’t even know that he had been on that tour boat. Was he out there some place lying dead or wounded, or trying desperately to reach the Allies, who were fast falling back toward Dunkirk? Two young people who had been torn apart. They’d been like a son and a daughter to him …

  “Herr Wunsch?”

  “Yes … yes, that’s me.”

  “You will come with us, please. The Gestapo Krantz wishes to ask you some questions.”

  Lev … Lev had gone back through to the cutting shop for something. Wunsch reached for his hat, then decided the effort wasn’t worth it.

  They would ask him about Richard and about Arlette, and he would have to tell them nothing.

  Fourteen

  AS A PATROL MADE its way through the darkness toward the Central Station, Hagen stepped into what had once been his office. The floor was littered with papers. Some caught the moonlight, others hid from it. All the furniture had been taken. Only the telephone, singled out by moonlight, stood sentinel to remind him of the past.

  It seemed an age since he’d first met the Dutchman here. Arlette had been so worried. Arlette and Bernard and Lev.