Attack at Night

by Robert Jackson

  Brough nodded and handed out the blankets to the others. Soon, all except Douglas and Conolly were asleep. Douglas, worried by his feeling of unease, paced restlessly around the room and wished that he could see outside. On more than one occasion he was tempted to open the door and take a look, but decided against such a move. In due course, he and Conolly were relieved by Brough and Sansom, but even then he found it impossible to sleep properly. After a while he lapsed into a fitful doze and awoke unrefreshed at dawn, with a foul taste in his mouth.

  A pounding on the door roused them all and they tumbled out of their blankets, reaching for the MP-40s. They kept the doorway covered as Lambert drew the bolts on Douglas’s signal and swung the door open. Pale daylight flooded into the barn and Raoul stood on the threshold.

  ‘You can come out now,’ he told Douglas. ‘There is no danger as yet. We have time to eat.’

  They filed out of the barn, looking around them in curiosity, seeing their surroundings clearly for the first time since their arrival in France. The barn in which they had spent the night, they now saw, stood on the edge of a small village, a cluster of half a dozen cottages with white limestone walls and red roofs. The village lay amid fertile, green countryside, with a range of hills climbing on the northern skyline.

  The old woman came out of one of the cottages, tottering under the weight of a huge and steaming tureen. She placed it on the ground and then went back indoors, returning with a pile of bowls and some sticks of bread which she distributed among the SAS men. Unbidden, they dipped their bowls into the tureen, which was filled with hot soup. It had a vegetable flavour which Douglas could not quite place, and was slightly spiced. He tore off a hunk of bread and dipped it into the liquid.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked Raoul. The Frenchman waved a hand towards the cottages. ‘Indoors,’ he said. ‘We thought it better that you were seen by nobody but myself and my mother. Jean-Pierre and the other Maquisards have gone back to the hills. This is a place of old women and little children.’ He paused and then said, very seriously, ‘You should not have antagonized Jean-Pierre. Despite what I said earlier, he can be a dangerous enemy. But then, you are not likely to meet him again.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Douglas muttered. ‘But where’s Colette?’

  ‘Gone,’ the Frenchman told him, and smiled thinly. ‘Don’t look so alarmed — she will be back before too long. Then my task will be over, and I can get back to my real work.’

  Douglas looked at him, puzzled. ‘Which is?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Why, making life as uncomfortable as possible for the Germans, of course,’ Raoul told him. ‘That has been my main occupation for some time now.’

  Douglas was still perplexed. He set down his soup bowl and asked, ‘But who are you? Your English is far too good for you to be what you seem.’

  For the first time, Raoul allowed his face to relax into a grin. ‘Maybe that’s because I’m not French, Captain Douglas. I’m French-Canadian. Got taken prisoner at Dieppe, escaped, and made my way south to the Vichy Zone. Thought I’d head for Marseilles and hop a ship for Algiers. Then the good guys invaded North Africa, and that was that. So I decided to devote my war effort to helping out in these parts. The Maquis could use my military experience. They’re a good bunch, but piss poor at organizing anything.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ Douglas exploded. ‘Why the blazes didn’t you tell me this in the first place?’ He frowned suddenly. ‘But the old woman — you called her your mother.’

  Raoul nodded. ‘Yes. I’ve been calling her that for months now — kind of got used to it. She took me in and fed me when I wandered into this place, and put me in touch with all the right people. She wanted me to call her mother. I think I’m a sort of replacement for her real son, who went off and joined the Foreign Legion and got his head blown off fighting the Arabs.’

  Douglas shook his head. ‘Amazing. But you haven’t answered my original question. Why didn’t you let me know who you were right away?’

  ‘Because I wanted to know more about you,’ Raoul said. ‘This is my territory, and I don’t like to be in the dark about anything that goes on it. Now that I know a bit more about why you are here, I’ll have some of my men keep an eye on you — just in case you run into trouble.’

  ‘Colette told you why we are here?’ Douglas asked quietly.

  ‘Not everything, but enough,’ the other replied. ‘Certainly enough for me to realize that if your plans don’t succeed, it will be some time longer before I see Quebec again.’

  Douglas had not the heart to tell Raoul that he had no plans, at least not yet. So much depended on Colette, and the next contact along the Resistance line.

  Their breakfast over, they collected their weapons and equipment and, on Raoul’s advice, took shelter in a small copse that stood a few hundred yards away from the village to await Colette’s return. By this time, the clouds that had shrouded southern France during the previous night had broken up almost completely, and the sun rose higher in a watery blue sky. The breeze from the Mediterranean was cool, but not unpleasantly so. Olds glanced up at a blackbird, singing lustily in a treetop, sniffed the air and announced confidently that it would rain before the day was many hours older.

  Douglas deployed his men along the edge of the copse that faced the village. Now that the soldiers had gone, those villagers who remained came out of the cottages and busied themselves with their morning tasks of feeding livestock and collecting eggs; no one so much as glanced in the direction of the trees. It was all a bit unreal; here they were, in the heart of enemy territory, overlooking a peaceful village where the only sign of the war was the absence of menfolk. This area, Douglas told himself, must be completely safe, otherwise the Germans and the Milice would have been asking awkward questions as to the men’s whereabouts.

  Olds had been right about the rain. Before midday the clouds gathered again and the rain came, torrents of it, heavy but warm, streaming from a leaden sky. A mist of droplets drifted across the grassy plain that ran southwards from the village.

  Just after noon, Sansom, who was keeping watch at the left-hand end of the line, raised the alarm. Douglas ran across to him, carefully keeping under cover of the trees, and asked what it was the trooper had seen. Sansom pointed towards the south, and the SAS officer made out a vague white blur of movement through the rain.

  After a few seconds, the blur resolved itself into a small herd of white horses. There were only two riders, who appeared to be driving the rest. They headed towards the village and halted beside the farm. One of the riders got down and spoke to Raoul, who had appeared from one of the houses. Douglas counted twelve horses in all, and reached the obvious conclusion.

  ‘Unless I’m much mistaken,’ he said to Sansom, ‘that’s our transport.’ Fortunately, after his own experiences in Yugoslavia, where the Partisans had made much use of horses, he had insisted on every man in his section learning to ride on the grounds that it might come in handy. It certainly looked as though his foresight was going to come in handy now.

  The rider who had spoken to Raoul remounted and cantered towards the copse. It was Colette, now wearing a broad-brimmed cowboy-type hat and a poncho. Both streamed with water. She dismounted again and unslung a pair of large saddle-bags from the horse’s back.

  ‘There are some hats and ponchos in these,’ she explained. ‘Put them on. You’ll be less conspicuous that way. Then follow me down to the village.’ Jumping astride the horse once more, she galloped off without another word.

  Douglas and the others did as they were told. Back at the village, Colette and the other rider were busily shortening the long reins they had been using to control their respective teams of horses as they drove them across the plain; it was a technique, Colette explained, that had been in use in the Camargue since the days of the Romans.

  Colette made no attempt to introduce the other rider, who remained a little aloof from the rest of the party as they mounted up. The horses were spirited
, but controllable. Conolly, Douglas noticed, was more at ease than any of them; the look that crossed his face as he caressed the neck of his mount was almost one of exultation.

  As they trotted out of the village, destination unknown, Douglas turned in the saddle and gave a brief salute to Raoul, who raised an arm in return. Douglas wondered if they would ever meet again. The odds, he thought, were stacked heavily against it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  General Horst von Falkenberg stepped down from the Volkswagen 82 Kubelwagen — the Wehrmacht’s equivalent of the famous American jeep — and swore fluently as his highly-polished boots sank into four inches of mud. He turned and glared at the driver, a young Luftwaffe corporal.

  ‘Idiot!’ he snarled. ‘Couldn’t you have picked a drier spot?’ The corporal reddened and muttered an apology. The general’s criticism was hardly fair, for the entire surface of the field had been turned into a quagmire by the heavy rain.

  The Kubelwagen was accompanied by a two-ton Opel Blitz half-track. Twenty heavily armed soldiers jumped down from the back of it and, spurred by the harsh commands of an NCO, spread out across the field, forming a protective cordon around the general. Two more men stepped out of the cab, in which the driver remained. The taller of the two wore a long greatcoat that bore the insignia of a Luftwaffe colonel; the other was dressed in civilian clothing but might just as well have been in uniform, for the thigh-length black leather coat and the dark, broad-brimmed felt hat were the characteristic of the Gestapo.

  The two men approached von Falkenberg and the Luftwaffe officer saluted. He was beginning to feel warm in his greatcoat, for the rain had ceased some time ago and the sun had come out again.

  Colonel Karl Preuss, officer commanding Kampfgruppe 100, was beginning to wish that he had never set eyes on von Falkenberg. Despite his First World War decorations, the man had become a typical staff officer, haughty and overbearing, straight from the plush and relatively secure offices of the Reich Air Ministry in Berlin. He had, Preuss suspected, authorized a trip to Istres for himself as much to sample the wine and food of Provence as to see how the new weapon worked, which was ostensibly the reason behind his visit.

  Von Falkenberg had been at Istres for less than forty-eight hours, and in that time he had never been off Preuss’s back. He wanted to fly, to see the new weapon in action for himself. Preuss had spent hours trying to convince him that the weather was unsuitable, that there was little in the way of a worthwhile target, that the weapons were in short supply anyway, and existing stocks had to be carefully husbanded for the coming big operation. It was all useless. Von Falkenberg wanted to fly, and see one of the weapons launched at something. Preuss had resigned himself to the fact that once the general had made his trip, he might then go back to Germany and leave everybody in peace.

  Then this little business had cropped up, just to complicate matters even further. A couple of nights ago, a local militiaman had received a report that an aeroplane had come down somewhere in this area. The German authorities had been informed, and had sent out a Fieseler Storch observation aircraft to make a low-level search. Its crew had not found any downed aeroplane, but they had sighted what appeared to be pronounced tyre-tracks in a long field. It was a little unfortunate, Preuss thought, that von Falkenberg had got wind of the affair; the general had insisted on seeing for himself, and so here they were, in company with a weasel-faced little runt from the Gestapo.

  ‘Where?’ the general demanded curtly. The Gestapo man regarded him through slitted eyes, and there was a long pause before he answered. Even generals did not use that tone of voice to the Gestapo these days, and fail to have their names entered in a little book for future attention.

  He pointed with a black-gloved hand. ‘Over there, I believe, Herr General.’ There was a slight and rather sinister emphasis on the title. The Gestapo man’s tone did not go unnoticed by von Falkenberg, who chose to ignore it.

  They trudged through the mud to the spot indicated. The twin set of tyre tracks was easy to see. The party followed them, noting a spot where they appeared to sink deeper into the ground. The general turned to Preuss.

  ‘Your opinion, Colonel?’ he demanded.

  Preuss peered at the marks. ‘Aircraft tyres, most definitely, Herr General,’ he said. ‘Quite a large aircraft, obviously, and heavily-laden on landing, judging by the depth of the ruts. Also,’ he added professionally, ‘I would say that the tyres were of American make. The tread has quite a distinctive pattern. Possibly a c-47, or Dakota, as the British call it.’ In this he was wrong, but his analysis was close enough.

  ‘Sir!’ The shout came from the Luftwaffe corporal, the general’s driver, who had been following the party at a respectful distance. He hurried across and stood rigidly before von Falkenberg, saluting crisply. The Gestapo man saw that the salute was of the standard Wehrmacht type, rather than the version pioneered by the Führer. That, too, would be noted.

  Anxious to redeem himself for his earlier failure to deposit the general in a dry patch, the corporal said, ‘Herr General, I humbly beg to report that there are more tracks over there. They are not as easy to see as these.’

  The general nodded. ‘Good, Lehnert. Well done. We shall take a look.’

  He strode across the field, followed by his entourage. The Gestapo man found that he was almost forced to trot to match the strides of the general and Colonel Preuss, and fumed inwardly at this indignity. Something would have to be done, he told himself, to teach these Luftwaffe upstarts a lesson.

  The second set of tyre marks ran parallel to the first, some distance away and on slightly drier ground. The general and Preuss spent several minutes inspecting them, and also some curious circular marks spaced at intervals alongside. At length, Preuss gave his opinion.

  ‘It is quite clear what happened here,’ he announced. ‘An aircraft, quite heavily laden, landed here and disgorged a cargo of some sort. At the end of its landing run it became bogged down, was extricated, and then took off along this line here, where the ground is a little drier. These circular marks seem to have been made by oil drums — used, no doubt, to form a flarepath.’

  The general looked at him with some amusement. He had reached the same fairly obvious conclusion some time ago.

  ‘Quite,’ he said drily. ‘But what we need to know, Preuss, is what, or who, was off-loaded from the aircraft.’ He turned suddenly to the Gestapo man.

  ‘Where is the nearest village?’

  Thrown by the sudden question, the Gestapo man pulled a map from his pocket and consulted it. ‘About a mile in that direction, Herr General,’ he said, pointing towards the west. Von Falkenberg nodded.

  ‘Very well. Then I suggest you take these troops and make a thorough investigation. Find out what the villagers know. I am sure there are methods you can use, if they prove reluctant to talk.’

  The Gestapo man glared at him, but said nothing. Von Falkenberg turned to Preuss and said: ‘You can come back to Istres with me in the Kubelwagen, Preuss. I hardly think we shall need an escort. The weather is clearing nicely; I wish to fly this afternoon.’ He turned on his heel and strode back to the car, the driver running ahead and Preuss following, swearing quietly to himself.

  Some hours later, a twin-engined Dornier 217 bomber made its ungainly way around the perimeter track at Istres. The aircraft was heavily laden; in addition to a substantial load of fuel, it carried a pair of stub-winged missiles under its wings, each one weighing a ton.

  The Dornier turned on to the runway. In the cockpit, Colonel Preuss opened up the engines to full power and the aircraft began to move, laboriously at first, held back by the weight it carried. The tail came up but the pilot continued to hold the Dornier down on the runway, adding a few extra knots to the normal take-off speed for safety. Then it was airborne and climbing away ponderously, its undercarriage coming up as it entered a steady climb, circling over Istres before settling down on a south-westerly heading.

  Heavily conscious of the presence of Gene
ral von Falkenberg just behind him, occupying the radio operator’s seat, Karl Preuss chewed on an unlit cigar and allowed his thoughts to wander. Despite the authorization signed personally by von Falkenberg, everything about this flight was highly irregular and ran counter to the orders Preuss had received from the Luftwaffe High Command. Those orders had stated, quite specifically, that the new weapons were not to be used again until the chance came to mount a major attack. The factory that produced them had been heavily bombed, and it would be some time before production picked up once more. The missile stocks at Istres were all that existed.

  The trouble was, Preuss thought, that von Falkenberg outranked the officer who had signed the order. There wasn’t much he, a mere group commander, could do about it. Inwardly, as he flew on, the pilot cursed everything; the war, von Falkenberg, the improvement in the weather which had made this flight possible, the reconnaissance report of a large enemy freighter west of Sardinia, the freighter that was now their target. Preuss hoped fervently that the ship was still beyond the range of the Spitfire squadrons that had recently moved into Corsica.

  Hampered by the drag of its missiles, the Dornier was making a bare 180 miles per hour. At this rate, it would be over an hour before the bomber reached the target area. To help pass the time, and also to relieve some of the tension that gripped the back of his neck, Preuss decided to make some small talk. Over the intercom, he spoke to his observer, Sergeant Rainer Becher, who was crouched at his station in the bomber’s glazed nose. Much depended on Becher’s skill, for he was responsible for guiding the missiles. The other crew members, navigator and flight engineer, had their respective positions behind the pilot. At action stations, each crew member manned an MG131 machine-gun, while the pilot controlled a forward-firing cannon mounted in the nose and operated by a trigger on his control column.