Courtney's War

by Wilbur Smith

  At the beginning of the day, a lifetime ago, Yulia would have been reduced to a tearful wreck by such a sight. Now her anger steeled her nerve as she looked through her sights, aimed at one of the tanks and gave the order, “Fire!”

  The shell smashed into a building behind the tank, which reacted like a huge steel animal, searching out the source of this new threat. Its turret turned from left to right as it sighted for a target.

  “Reload!” Morisov shouted. “Faster! Faster!”

  The tank commander inside the Panzer IV found what he was looking for. His gun settled on the anti-aircraft emplacement.

  Yulia felt as though the barrel was pointing directly at her, like an empty eye.

  She stared back. She knew that the enemy was bound to fire at any moment, but even though it was only for a fraction of a second, she paused for an apparent eternity, made certain of her aim and screamed once again, “Fire!”

  There was an instant explosion as the tank was hit dead-on. The enemy gun was almost blown out of the turret, which burst into flames. Men scrambled from inside it, trying to escape, but climbing straight into the bullets being fired from the Russian soldiers in front of them.

  One of the other guns in the battery had also hit another of the German tanks, but it was only a glancing blow. Morisov saw and shouted, “Traverse left! Engage that tank!”

  The girls got to work, rapidly turning the wheels that rotated the gun. Their focus was on the battle that faced them. As she looked through the sights, something flew into Yulia’s eye. It was no more than a speck of dust, but it affected her vision.

  She drew her hand away from her sights and wiped her hand across the eye.

  And that was when she saw it. The Germans had sent another tank on a flanking maneuver. It was coming down one of the sidestreets, unnoticed.

  Yulia saw the gun barrel pointing at her, just like the other one had. But she had no answer to it. They could never turn their own gun to face it.

  There wasn’t time to get away.

  We’re all going to die.

  The tank fired. It scored a direct hit. Yulia, Maria, Morisov and the rest of the gun crew were killed, vaporized in the blink of an eye.

  The Battle of Stalingrad, on the other hand, had only just begun.

  As the weeks went by, not only did Saffron’s grasp of both Flemish and French improve, so did her familiarity with the minutiae of Belgian life. She began to feel more certain that if she should find herself opposite an SS officer in a train compartment, she would be able to carry on a conversation that would have him thinking more about her as a woman he might want to impress and seduce, than an agent to be arrested, interrogated and shot.

  “That’s excellent news,” said Amies when she confided this to him. “The more you can get a man thinking with his balls, not his brain, the safer you will be.”

  “What if I have to give him what his balls demand?”

  “Better that than a Gestapo interrogation. Now, please excuse me, I have a pair of agents to brief.”

  “Yes, sir,” Saffron replied, finding it hard to hide her disappointment that she would not be going with him.

  Amies had, on one memorable occasion, allowed Saffron into the Baker Street room. Its walls were covered with maps, reconnaissance photographs, pictures of Resistance contacts and German targets, and any other documents that might be considered necessary for a mission. As a security measure, because every effort was made to keep each section’s operations secret, canvas blinds could be pulled down over material that related to one country, when another country’s agents were being briefed.

  In the middle of a room there stood a large table on which maps could be unfurled, or large scale models of target areas placed. These models were extraordinarily accurate, with every hill, river, road, railway, important building or any detail of the landscape clearly represented, virtually down to the last tree, so that anyone embarking on a sabotage mission knew what the target area was like. The models were constructed within large, shallow wooden boxes, roughly six-feet square.

  “If I’m giving the briefing I stand here,” Amies had told her, resting one foot on the edge of the box. “Then I use this”—he picked up a long, pointed stick that resembled a billiards cue—“to indicate the various key features the agents are to bear in mind.”

  “Are you sure I can’t attend the briefings, sir?” Saffron had pleaded. “I wouldn’t speak out of turn, but I do believe I might be able to make the odd useful contribution.”

  “I have no doubt about that,” Amies replied. “I’d go further. In my view you would be ideally suited to handling agents, both during the preparations for missions and while they are in the field.”

  “Then . . .”

  Amies finished the sentence for her: “Why aren’t you doing that instead of buttering up the Belgians and touring our training facilities?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because, Ensign Courtney, there is an unbreakable rule here at Baker Street. Once anyone, myself included, knows about the general strategy of a national section, or its current status, or the names of the agents either in the field or set for missions, then they are forbidden to go on missions themselves. It’s too risky. If they were to get caught they could give away our entire network in that country. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But I am happy to give you the choice. If you would like to come and work in-house, for the duration, I would be delighted to offer you a job. You would be extremely competent, do work that was vital to the war effort and be promoted swiftly up the ranks.”

  “I don’t want to waste my training. And I’d feel I was running away from the fight.”

  “Nonsense. Your training would be of huge assistance in giving you a real insight into the work our agents do and the standards they must reach. As for running away, my dear girl, you have already exposed yourself to more danger than any woman has a duty to do. No one would dream of faulting you for that. We get endless criticism for using women as agents, not for letting them stay at home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you have that option, in which case your presence at briefings and many other meetings would, I’m sure, be not only possible, but beneficial. Or, you may continue to work toward a state of readiness for deployment as an agent. But in that case, the meeting room, and all contact with active agents, is verboten. The choice is yours.”

  “I want to be an agent, sir,” Saffron replied without hesitation.

  “Then the next time you see this room will be when it is your mission that we are discussing.”

  •••

  Saffron went back to her role as liaison with the Belgian government-in-exile. With every passing day she became more deeply embedded in the strange, unreal world of people who posed as the true rulers of a nation that was under the domination of another, mightier power. She found that Belgian ministers and officials might tell her all about the politics and history of their nation, but it was the women who worked for the government-in-exile who were better sources for the minutiae that Amies had described, the details of daily life in the country they had left behind.

  They told her how to carry herself in public to fit in with everyone else, or do her hair, or chat to shopkeepers and market stallholders as they would do. They knew the actors and crooners that she should swoon over, the books and magazines she should read. And they knew the giveaways that would make other women think that there was something suspicious about her. In a world where any man or woman might be a collaborator, only too willing to betray her, those giveaways could cost her life.

  Other women were Saffron’s best source of information at Baker Street, too. There wasn’t a scrap of news about the personal lives of Baker Street’s inhabitants that didn’t eventually find its way into the female intelligence network. The same went for the endless political intrigues between Baker Street and the rival British and American agencies, which were, in some ways, even gr
eater threats to Baker Street’s survival than the Gestapo.

  Saffron was given a beginner’s guide to the inter-departmental warfare of Britain’s intelligence services by Margaret Jackson, Gubbins’s beautiful, hazel-eyed, 25-year-old secretary and indispensable right-hand woman. Margaret and Saffron had spent a while conducting an unspoken, but mutually understood, negotiation about their personal relationship. They were both pretty young women, who attracted a large amount of male attention, but made it plain that, while they did not object to being admired, they were not available.

  They could either be deadly rivals, or the closest of friends. Each had been concerned that the other might be manipulative, untrustworthy or bitchy. When it became clear that this was not the case and that they shared a plainspoken honesty, they became intimate friends.

  One Sunday in October 1942, Saffron invited Margaret to lunch at Chesham Court. She got around the handicap of being hopeless in the kitchen by enlisting the services of a 22-year-old code breaker called Leo Marks, who was famous for two things. The first was his uncanny ability to decipher impossibly scrambled, wrongly encoded messages from agents in the field—a talent for which all Baker Street agents were grateful, for it was a huge risk to have to send a message twice, knowing that the Germans had signal tracking and direction-finding devices everywhere.

  This boy genius’s second gift was that he could procure gorgeous foodstuffs that were unavailable through official ration books. He pretended that this was because he was the nephew of Sir Simon Marks, the proprietor of Marks and Spencer. The truth was that he still lived with his parents, a respectable bookseller and his wife, who happened to have the best black-market contacts in London.

  Saffron was able to serve Margaret Jackson an illegal, but splendid, selection of cold roast beef, ham and roast chicken, with a fresh green salad, followed by the creamiest custard tarts that either of them had tasted in years. To women who normally survived on a wartime diet, this was a feast fit for royalty.

  Afterward, as they were relaxing over cups of the best coffee Saffron had tasted since she’d left the Middle East, Margaret said, “Now that we’re going to be such great chums, perhaps I should fill you in on how our beloved Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare really works.”

  “Oh, yes, please,” Saffron replied.

  “I’ll start at the top, with Brigadier Gubbins.”

  “You rather like him, don’t you?”

  Margaret put a hand to her face and felt her cheeks, as if they were blushing. “Oh dear, is it terribly obvious?”

  “Only that you work awfully hard for him. No matter how late I’ve left work, if I look back at the top floor the light is always on in your office.”

  “It’s not because I have a pash on him in that way, if you know what I mean. He is a married man. But I admire the Brigadier tremendously and I have to be there because he works so hard himself. It’s the agents, you see. He feels he has to make sure we do everything we can to help them. I can’t let him down.”

  “He’s very fierce, though, isn’t he? I’ve only bumped into him a couple of times, but the way he looks at one with those cold blue eyes . . . like he can see into your soul. I’d hate to get on the wrong side of him!”

  “He can be quite hard, I know,” Margaret agreed, “but he’s hardest on himself. And you have no idea how much of his time is spent keeping Baker Street in business.”

  “Really? I thought Churchill loved us. Didn’t he say we should ‘set Europe ablaze’?”

  “The PM’s a supporter, but there are plenty of people in his ear all day long, telling him to get rid of us.”

  Saffron nodded. “Well, I do know the War Office chaps don’t like us. They think we don’t play fair.”

  “Yes, but they’re not the worst. The real problem is C . . .”

  “Ah . . . the Bastards of Broadway,” Saffron said. As Amies had predicted, she had spent enough time in Baker Street to become accustomed to the endless blizzard of initials. But C was perhaps the most arcane of all. It referred to the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, which was better known to the wider world as MI6. For those in the business of spying and sabotage, however, it was known as C because that was the initial with which its boss signed all his letters and memos. And its offices were located on a street called Broadway, not far from the Houses of Parliament.

  “So,” she went on, “why do the bastards want to get rid of us? Aren’t we all on the same side?”

  Margaret laughed. “I’ve long ago given up any hope of that! They’re behaving like schoolboys. As far as they’re concerned, they were in the spying game before us, and they don’t see why we should be allowed to spoil their fun.”

  “Aren’t we doing something different?” Saffron asked. “We send our agents in to help Resistance groups and commit acts of sabotage. It’s another way of fighting, half way between spies and normal soldiers.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. But C have the full might of the Foreign Office behind them and they’re working hard to persuade the PM that he’s wasting resources on us and we’ll never come to anything. That’s one of the reasons the Brigadier is keen to make sure that all our operations go well. He can’t afford a slip-up.”

  Margaret paused. Something was bothering her.

  “Would you like some more coffee?” Saffron asked.

  Margaret nodded. “Thank you.”

  Saffron let her friend sip some of the drink and then asked, “What’s the matter? I can see there’s something on your mind. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “That’s terribly sweet of you, but no . . . it’s nothing either of us can do.”

  Sometimes, the most effective form of interrogation is to say nothing. It was a lovely afternoon, warm enough to have the windows half open, and Saffron drank her coffee and took pleasure in the light of the autumn sun pouring into her drawing room. She listened to the cars passing outside, the voices of children chattering as they walked by. She thought she could smell something in the air, a delicious, smoky aroma. When she went to the window and looked down to the street, there on the corner of Chesham Square was the first roast chestnut seller of the year.

  Margaret said, “If I tell you something I shouldn’t, will you promise me, on your honor, not to tell another living soul?”

  “Of course . . . but don’t feel you have to say anything. Not if you’ll feel bad for saying it.”

  Margaret sighed. “I’ve been carrying it around like a weight round my neck for weeks.”

  “What is it?” Saffron asked.

  “I think that something’s not quite right . . out in the field, I mean. I can’t say where . . .”

  “Of course not, I understand.”

  “But . . . well . . . there may be a serious problem in one particular country. It’s the sort of thing that C has been hoping for.”

  “To help them get what they want, you mean?”

  “Yes. If this is as bad as it looks, this could be the end for all of us. They’ll be closing down Baker Street for good.”

  It was early November, well into the third month of the Stalingrad campaign, and the city had become a hell of bombs, shells and howling Katyusha rockets; an inferno of flame and choking smoke; a grinder of human meat. Hundreds of thousands of men had been thrown into the battle, new corpses lying on the rotting remains of the old, but still the Russians were hanging onto one last pocket of the city on the west bank of the Volga. As long as they held that, they could be supplied and reinforced from the far bank, to the east, which was still in Soviet hands. The red army could keep feeding the furnace with bullets, shells and men, and the carnage was bound to continue.

  Attrition was taking its toll on the fighter squadrons. Every day Gerhard’s fighters seemed to face more Soviet aircraft, and the weight of numbers was becoming overwhelming. Gerhard’s squadron had halved from twelve pilots to six—young Otto Braun, among many others, had long since been blasted out of the sky—and there were often not enough working aircr
aft or fuel to put them in the air.

  Gerhard had spent the morning in the hangers at Pitomnik, the airfield twenty kilometers west of Stalingrad that had been his base since mid-September, going over every millimeter of the squadron’s surviving Messerchmitts with a couple of senior ground crewmen. Virtual zero visibility, caused by thick, freezing fog, had kept German and Russian aircraft on the ground since dawn. But there was a chance of operations later in the day, so he wanted to make sure that some of his aircraft were ready to go.

  With the job done, he headed toward the officers’ mess. The Führer was giving a speech, to be broadcast on the radio, and woe betide the serviceman who failed to listen to it. Gerhard had no option but to take in the ravings of a man he now considered to be a homicidal maniac, but he was damned if he was going to get through the ordeal without the aid of a large drink.

  As he made his way across the airfield, the fog had lifted, but it was still impossible to see even ten meters in front of his face. Suddenly another figure emerged from the gloom, an Army officer, with his greatcoat wrapped around him, head down, apparently oblivious to his surroundings.

  “Watch out!” Gerhard shouted.

  The soldier came to a halt within touching distance of Gerhard. His greatcoat was as filthy and torn as a beggar’s rags, but his shoulder tabs were those of a major, the same rank as Gerhard. He raised his head, revealing the chalky skin and hollow, red-rimmed, half-dead eyes that every German foot-soldier Gerhard met now possessed.

  “My apologies,” he said. “Name’s Werth . . . Major Andreas Werth.”

  “Major Gerhard von Meerbach.” He took pity on a brother officer. “If you don’t mind me saying, Werth, you look as though you could use a square meal. And a drink. I plan to have both myself while I listen to the Führer bless us with his wisdom. May I invite you to join me?”