Courtney's War

by Wilbur Smith

  The Lieutenant Commander turned his head and looked toward the stairs. Their eyes met and locked together with a connection that sent a shock deep into her stomach.

  “Danny,” she gasped.

  Marks had paused when Saffron did. He’d seen how she and the American had looked at one another and the way that the sight of him had affected her.

  “Anyone you know?” he asked, as casually as he could.

  Saffron didn’t say a word. She nodded. She chewed her lower lip. And, lost for words, she walked to the top of the stairs.

  Another Baker Street officer was waiting for them. “Where have you two been?” he asked. “The show’s about to start, but the old man wants to give us a pep talk first. You’ve kept him waiting . . .”

  “Ah,” Marks said. They knew how strongly Brigadier Gubbins felt about punctuality. They were hurried away to an ante-room, where Gubbins and a few more SOE people were waiting.

  Gubbins didn’t say anything to Saffron and Marks. He didn’t need to. One freezing stare from those ice-blue eyes put them in their place as effectively as a verbal rocket from any other man.

  “Right then, now that we are all here, let’s make sure we’re on the same page,” Gubbins said. “Each of you has a contribution to make to the day’s program. Make it. Read your lines. Do not be tempted to improvise. Do not engage in displays of humor.”

  “Is he talking to me?” Marks whispered to Saffron.

  She did not respond. Her mind was reeling from the sight of Danny. Part of her wanted to dash out the door of this dingy little room, run across to the balcony and throw herself at him. Another part of her was thankful she had been denied the opportunity to make a fool of herself.

  She had not been listening to Gubbins, but she sensed, more than heard, that he was coming to the end of his remarks. “Yes, sir,” she said, along with the others, when he asked if they’d got the message.

  “Right then,” Gubbins said. “Follow me.”

  He led them into a conference room that had dark, wood-paneled walls beneath a vaulted white ceiling. Two bronze chandeliers, suspended on chains from the ceiling, hung over an oak table long enough to have a dozen chairs on either side. The British and Canadian representatives were directed down one side of the table. Their American counterparts faced them on the other.

  Saffron took her place. She was the only woman in the room, aside from a stenographer, sitting to one side, who was taking notes of the proceedings. She spent a few seconds extracting everything she needed from her bag and making sure that she had her report on Belgium, a notepad and a pen all handy.

  She looked up, across the table, straight into the eyes of Danny Doherty. He smiled at her: that lazy, confident, devastatingly seductive smile that she remembered with such clarity from Arisaig. Almost two years had passed, but when she saw that smile, and the way his eyes crinkled, it might as well have been two minutes.

  It took all the self-control she possessed to get through the day. She found herself grateful for Gubbins’s half-heard instructions. All that was required was for her to sum up T Section’s current operations and those being planned to coincide with the invasion in a straightforward way. When she was asked questions, she answered them as thoroughly as she was able. Otherwise she kept her mouth shut and did everything she could to pay attention to whomever else was speaking, and not the face of the man across the table. It was hard not to wonder what Danny had been doing since they had last met. For all she knew he had married his girl in Washington, DC. There was no ring on his finger, but plenty of married men did not wear one. He could already be a father, for all she knew.

  Eventually the meeting ended. The three-star general, who had chaired proceedings, summed up everything that had been agreed, looked toward Gubbins and the SOE contingent, and said, “You know, Brigadier, I have to admit I was kinda skeptical about your outfit. I guess I’m a traditionalist. The way I wage war is, I get a bunch of hairy-assed bastards in uniform, train the heck out of ’em, get ’em the best equipment Uncle Sam has to offer, and put ’em up against the other guy’s bastards. The idea of sending civilians, including female civilians, into harm’s way, to kill the enemy and sabotage his operations, well, that never sat too well with me. But I’ve gotta admit, the results you’re getting are damned impressive.”

  His eyes fell on Saffron. “Tell me, Captain, you spoke well about the Resistance movement in Belgium and its effectiveness as a weapon against the Germans. Have you been there and met these people for yourself?”

  “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to answer that question, sir,” Saffron said. She glanced toward Gubbins. He gave a fractional nod of the head. She addressed the general again. “Yes, sir, I have. I spent some months in the Low Countries last year. I met a few of the key members of the Resistance . . . and of the German administration.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Here we are, gentlemen, dreaming of the day we set foot on Occupied Europe and this little lady has beaten us to it. My congratulations, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Saffron heard a cough to her right. Marks was passing her a note. Fair warning! it read. From now on I plan to call you Little Lady.

  Saffron considered it for a few seconds and then, as the general stood to leave, scribbled back: Also fair warning. Am trained to kill.

  •••

  “You made a conquest there,” Danny said.

  He was waiting outside the door of the meeting room as Saffron walked out.

  “I can’t talk,” Saffron said. “Gubbins wants us all back to Baker Street for a debrief.”

  “I have to see you, Saffron.”

  She tried so hard to resist. And then she thought, Why? Why do I have to deny myself? Gerhard’s probably dead. If Danny’s married, that’s his responsibility. Why do I have to be so bloody alone all the time?

  “I should be able to get out by half past eight,” she said.

  “I’ll be there, outside.”

  “No, don’t. People will see us. Listen, I’ll take the bus from work to Knightsbridge. I’ll meet you outside the Scotch House. It’s at the corner, opposite the end of Sloane Street. You can’t miss it.”

  “I know it.” He smiled. “I bought a tartan blanket for my mom.”

  “I’ll try to make it by nine. But I can’t guarantee I’ll be on time.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  It was almost quarter to ten when Danny saw Saffron get off the bus. He was leaning against the side of a doorway, in the shadow, so as she looked around she couldn’t see him. He watched her hesitate, saw her shoulders droop when she thought he wasn’t there.

  Then he stepped out onto the pavement. Her face lit up, her whole body seemed to stand up straighter, and then she was running toward him and the look on her face was exultant. But there was desperation, too. He opened his arms to take her and she threw herself into them. She nestled her head against his shoulder, not looking at him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pulling their bodies tightly, almost fiercely together.

  He held her and felt her body quiver in his arms. She was crying. He stroked her hair and murmured, “It’s OK.” He bent down and kissed the top of her head and the scent of her filled his nostrils. She made a sound, a soft, wordless moan.

  Danny couldn’t work it out. He felt an overwhelming need to protect this girl, who tried so hard to be strong; he wished he could keep her safe so she didn’t ever have to try anymore. He wanted to be her wall against the world, her knight in shining armor. And at the same time, he wanted to take her and strip her and ravish her and hear her scream.

  For now, though, he knew he had to let her take her time. He held her tight and, after a while, she raised her face to him, and there was a look in her eyes that he had never seen before. She wasn’t the tough, highly trained spy, or the rich, sophisticated debutante. Her face had softened and it showed him all the pain and vulnerability and loss of the motherless daughter she was and went to such great lengths to conceal, from
herself and everyone else. He felt as if he was seeing the true Saffron Courtney. She had trusted him enough to show him her soul and he did not know what to do in response except take her head in his hands and kiss her and hope that his love could somehow heal her wounds.

  They remained locked in their embrace as around them the Tube-goers flooded in and out of Knightsbridge station and the cars and buses picked their way through the crossroads.

  It was Saffron who finally pulled away. She took Danny’s hand and said, “Come with me.”

  They walked arm in arm to Chesham Court, then managed to keep their hands off one another as they shared the slow, rattling lift up to Saffron’s floor with an elderly lady and her Pekingese. The lift reached its destination. Saffron and Danny emerged and walked, hand in hand, to her door.

  “Not yet,” she whispered as Danny tried to put an arm around her. “Someone might see.”

  The self-restraint was agonizing. Saffron was aching for him and her frustration only made her desperation all the more intense.

  She turned the key. They went in. The second the door closed behind them and the instant the latch clicked, Saffron pulled herself tight against Danny’s body as she felt him hard against her. They stumbled to her bedroom, still locked together, then tore themselves apart.

  Saffron won the race to be free from their uniforms. She didn’t care anymore about anyone or anything except for herself and Danny and the craving to feel him inside her. She spent all her life being dutiful and responsible. She didn’t want to think, or make decisions, or care about anything except pleasure.

  His body was lean, broad-shouldered and strong, and he was looking at her with the fierce determination of a hunter.

  Saffron looked him in the eye and said, “Here I am.”

  •••

  Later that night, Danny told Saffron that he had managed to get a transfer back into the regular navy. “I’ve been away so long, I can’t remember which end of the ship is which.”

  “The pointy end is the front,” Saffron said.

  Danny laughed. “The front—that’s starboard, right?”

  They didn’t talk about the war, or others in their lives. Danny didn’t tell Saffron whether he was married and she didn’t ask him. They had three nights together, and two days when Saffron found it almost impossible to concentrate at work for the tremors that ran through her body like an earthquake’s aftershocks whenever her mind turned to the night before.

  Then the third morning came, and this time Danny’s kitbag was lying on the living room floor of Saffron’s flat when she walked over to the kitchen to make him a cup of coffee. When he got out of bed, there was no tempting him back into it because a Jeep was coming to pick him up at 08:00, on the dot, and he had better be on the pavement to meet it.

  He was gone as suddenly as he had appeared. Saffron kept herself together as she waved him off. She wanted his last memory of her to be a good one. Only when the Jeep had disappeared down the road, and she had taken the rickety old lift up to her flat and closed the door behind her once again, did she give in to the tears.

  In time, though, they passed, and as the sun comes out from behind the darkest clouds once a shower has passed, so her mood lifted again and she felt almost cheerful as she rode the bus to Baker Street. There was, she had to admit, nothing like making love, frequently and ecstatically, to make a body feel alive.

  What it came down to, though, was the stripping away of her uniform and the revelation of her naked body. The war was almost five years old. She had spent that time as a driver, a fighter, an agent and an officer. But for those three nights, she had been nothing but a woman. And it was utterly marvelous.

  •••

  Konrad von Meerbach’s father Otto had been relentlessly unfaithful. He had made no effort to be discreet, nor done anything to lessen the private pain and social humiliation that his conduct caused his wife Alatha. He wanted to leave her. He made no secret of the fact. Yet he never managed to obtain a divorce. Alatha’s devout Catholic faith meant that she would not countenance such a step under any circumstances, and her husband had, for once in his life, been obliged to go along with her wishes.

  Looking back, Konrad found his father’s conduct toward his mother contemptible. He did not, of course, object to all the years of cruelty and neglect. So far as he was concerned, his mother had failed to satisfy her husband and deserved any punishment he chose to inflict upon her. What made Konrad despise his father’s conduct was the old man’s weakness in failing to find a way to divorce his wife, irrespective of her wishes.

  When the opportunity arose to rid himself of his first wife Trudi, Konrad did not waste any time. Trudi was a pretty, docile but insipid blonde, whose most appealing feature was that she was a great-niece of Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, or Gustav Krupp of the great Krupps steelmaking and armaments company. Despite the status and business advantage Trudi conferred on Konrad, she was a disappointment in bed and he had numerous affairs. He informed her that she would concede to a divorce, on whatever terms he chose to grant her.

  “And what if I do not agree to your terms?” she asked.

  “Then you will spend the few remaining days of your life in a slave-labor camp.”

  Even now, there were times when the depths of Konrad’s depravity could take his wife unawares. “But . . . but . . .” She could hardly get the words out. “I am the mother of your children. How could you take their mother from them?”

  “Easily. It would be your choice, after all. If you want your children to have a mother, you will give me the divorce.”

  The divorce was finalized within the month.

  Konrad was free to marry Francesca von Schöndorf. Francesca was his mistress and she had married Konrad as an act of bitter revenge on his brother Gerhard, who had rejected her for Saffron. The more he observed the effect of hatred on her personality, the greater the pleasure he took in finding new ways to corrupt her. He knew she did not love him in any feeble, fairy-tale sense. He could tell that there was a part of her that hated herself for allowing him to take possession of her. But that only made the act of sex with her more thrilling, for it was akin to rape and therefore more satisfying than a voluntary act of copulation, for it involved the application of power.

  She submitted to Konrad because she had become addicted to everything he could provide. Even before the divorce, she had long since become the mistress of Schloss Meerbach, with an army of staff at her beck and call. She dressed in the finest clothes that Paris could provide. She moved in the highest reaches of Nazi society. She counted Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels among her closest female friends. Even the Führer had declared himself charmed by her. For a girl raised in a family whose fine name was not matched by any great fortune, these were giddy heights, made intoxicating by the prodigious consumption of alcohol and narcotics in the court of the teetotal, non-smoking, vegetarian Führer.

  Konrad and Francesca married on Saturday, July 15, 1944, and he took a week’s leave so that they could honeymoon at Schloss Meerbach. Five days later, they were sailing on the limpid waters of the Bodensee (for Konrad fancied himself to be an expert yachtsman), when their peace was disturbed by an armed motorboat racing at speed toward them. It came to a halt ahead of the bows of Konrad’s skiff, forcing him to tack hard and then loosen his sails, coming to a halt in the water rather than crash into its hull.

  “This is an outrage!” Konrad shouted, standing up in the stern of his boat and waving his fist at the motorboat. “I am on my honeymoon. I gave strict orders not to be disturbed.”

  A young officer emerged from the motorboat’s cabin and came to the rail on the skiff, which was now lying alongside his vessel.

  “I apologize, Herr Brigadeführer. I am under orders to escort you to shore as quickly as possible.”

  Konrad’s first instinct was to fear that someone in Berlin had stabbed him in the back. He suddenly felt frightened, for the struggle for power at the top of the Reich was, by the Führer’s o
wn design, a continuous fight to the death. Because of that, it could be literally fatal to show any sign of weakness. He decided to brazen this out.

  “By God there had better be a good reason for this,” Konrad shouted, “or you and every one of your men will find yourself wearing army uniforms and serving on the Russian Front.”

  “Yes, sir. My orders come directly from Berlin. I am to inform you that this is an urgent matter of state, involving the safety of the Führer.”

  “The Führer? Has something happened? Has he been injured, or . . .” Konrad could not bring himself to end the sentence.

  “I don’t know, sir,” the young naval officer replied. “I was not given any information about the Führer beyond what I have told you. I can only tell you that you are to make your way to the nearest secure telephone and call SS headquarters at once. Please, Herr Brigadeführer, if you and the Countess would come aboard, we can attach a line to your boat and tow her to shore. It will only take a few minutes.”

  Less than a quarter of an hour later, Konrad was in his private study at Schloss Meerbach, where he had a secure line to Berlin. He was told a bomb had been detonated at the Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s field headquarters in East Prussia, from which he was directing the fighting on the Eastern Front, and on the new battleground of Normandy, where the Allies had launched their invasion of France. By a miracle the bomb had been placed against a heavy table leg that had deflected the blast away from the Führer. The hunt for the plotters was already underway. All senior officers were required immediately at their posts.

  “I am sorry, my dear, but our honeymoon is at an end,” Konrad informed Francesca. “You will have to amuse yourself here. I must return at once to Berlin.”

  “How is the Führer?” she asked.

  “He has survived an assassination attempt and is in good health. I can assure you that the same will not be true of the men who tried to murder him.”

  •••

  On July 21st Major-General Henning von Tresckow committed suicide on the front line, near the village of Królowy Most in eastern Poland, by detonating a hand grenade held under his chin. The following morning, as SS men went through his belongings, searching for clues that might lead them to other plotters, an officer—whose civilian rank was that of inspector in the criminal police—was reading a small notebook that had been found underneath von Tresckow’s bedding when he came across something that made him stop. He put the notebook down and smoked a cigarette while he contemplated what to do next. He came to the same conclusion as any middle-ranking individual in any large organization: move the problem up the chain of command.