by Gavin Scott
There were two of them, and they both had their heads under the hood of the engine as Forrester approached. He watched as they removed the distributor cap and put it on the running board. Unnoticed, Forrester picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he took Arontowitz’s gun out from the waistband of his trousers, stepped back and said:
“All right, boys, that’s enough.”
They straightened up from the engine and turned to him and Forrester knew they were gauging the distance between them before launching an attack. He took off the safety catch.
“On your way, gents. There’s no business for you here.”
“Fucking Forrester,” said the shorter of the two men. “What the fuck are you doing here?” And Forrester’s heart sank. Bob Wylie had been through SOE training camp with him, and they’d been on at least one mission together. Whatever he did now, he would be identified.
“If I told you I’d have to kill you,” said Forrester lightly. “But let’s put it this way: Ernie Bevin sent me.”
“Ernie fucking Bevin?” said the other man. “What have you got to do with Ernie fucking Bevin?”
“He’s asked me to find out who’s been trying to kill him,” said Forrester. “And that mission trumps this.”
“Nobody said nothing to Powell or me about you being here, Duncan,” said Wylie, uncertain now.
“No, they bloody didn’t,” said Powell. “So you can just fuck off and let us get on with it.”
“MI6 doesn’t tell everybody everything when it hires them, does it, mate?” returned Forrester. “They wouldn’t have been expecting you to run into me and I wasn’t expecting to run into you. But I’m telling you right now what I’m doing is a bloody sight more important than stealing the distributor cap off a lorry for a bunch of refugees. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of better things to do round here so I’d suggest you go off and do them and leave this to me.”
He could almost feel the uncertainty in the men’s minds, coupled with the fact that they knew he had all the training and operational experience they had, if not more, that he had positioned himself too far away for them to jump him, and that he had a gun trained on them. He thought about what the FBI man had told him in New York about Industrialists International.
“You’ve been told about the double I organisation, haven’t you?” and the two men glanced at each other: they obviously had. “Then we’re on the same team,” said Forrester. “Right?”
Finally, Wylie turned to the other man.
“Listen, Ted,” he said. “Let’s leave him to it. He’s a good bloke and he’s probably on the level. Besides we’ve got a banger to deliver, haven’t we?”
“To the ship?” said Forrester, casually.
“Limpet mine on the rudder,” said Wylie. “The buggers can load up as many DPs as they want but they’re not getting out of harbour with a busted rudder.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Forrester, neutrally. “Good luck with that.” And he let the conversation languish, as if everything had been resolved. Powell looked at him suspiciously, but decided he was in the minority and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, if you say he’s all right, Bob, I’ll go along with that.” Then he glared at Forrester. “But I don’t appreciate people that stick guns in my face and tell me what to do,” he said. “I’ll remember you, Mr. Forrester. And if you’ve been shitting us I’ll smash your bloody head in.”
And with that they vanished into the darkness. Forrester let out a long breath – he had solved one problem only to be confronted by another: the limpet mine. As he replaced the distributor cap in the engine and checked to see nothing else had been disturbed, his mind raced. He heard the distinctive throaty sound of a Citroën Traction Avant, probably a 15CV, starting up somewhere in the woods, and knew the two ex-SOE men had set off for their next rendezvous.
When he went back into the chateau everything had changed: the children were waking up and putting on their coats again, and Rosannah was organising them ready for departure. It seemed Doran Arontowitz had sent word the President Garfield was finally ready for them.
Forrester called Rosannah, Bernstein and the driver together and gave them an edited version of how he had prevented the two men from sabotaging the truck, then he asked Rosannah where the phone was so he could speak to somebody at the ship. She shook her head: they were afraid there was a tap on the line, she said, and had cut it off after Arontowitz’s last call.
“Besides, we don’t need to speak to them now, do we? We’ll be there in an hour.”
Forrester forced himself to look relaxed: there was no point in alarming them with what he knew.
“All right,” he said, “let’s get everybody aboard.”
The next fifteen minutes, once the driver had confirmed that the truck was fine, were consumed with helping the young women settle the children, and if Forrester had felt committed to them as they lay sleeping, by the time he had lifted the last little boy up to the truck bed and taken the painfully thin arm of the girl with her leg in a iron cage to hoist her in, there was a visceral bond between them. These children trusted him; they saw him as one of the few adults they had ever met in their lives who had not tried to catch, kill or torture them because they were Jews. As he felt their small heads rest briefly against his as he settled them into position, he knew he would do anything to ensure their safety. He had no idea how he was going to prevent the SOE men from attaching a limpet mine to the President Garfield, but he was quite prepared to die attempting it. He met Elizabeth’s eyes as he closed up the back of the truck, nodded his head without speaking.
Finally they set off from the chateau, moving slowly with dimmed lights. Forrester, trying to look relaxed, seethed with impatience as he tried to figure out what to do when they reached the port. In theory he could simply alert Arontowitz and let him deal with the saboteurs, but by the time he had found him and explained the situation and Arontowitz had assembled people to deal with it, it would probably be too late: the mine would have been attached. And if Wylie or Powell saw anyone coming to remove it, they would detonate it by remote control.
They were probably intending to use a timer which would explode the device as soon as the President Garfield tried to leave port, thus rendering her immovable, rather than trying to sink her at sea, but any attempt to disable the bomb would undoubtedly lead to its detonation.
So the question was how would the two SOE men proceed? He knew from what they had said that they had the limpet mine in the car with them; he assumed they would also have wetsuits, so they could swim across the basin to the ship. They would have to stop to put the wetsuits on, or do it at the harbour itself. Either way it would take time and there was at least the possibility that the mine would not be in position by the time Forrester arrived.
And in this, for the first time in the last six hours, luck was with him. As the truck reached Sète and began to drive along the top of the mole Forrester had a clear view of the President Garfield’s stern, and it was clear there was too much activity there for the SOE men to have done anything yet – they would be waiting until the action moved elsewhere.
But where were they now? Forrester scanned the mole, the lighthouse and the Old Basin, and his mouth tightened as he saw, on the far side of the harbour, beside the canal, the sleek low-slung shape of a Citroën Traction Avant. He had no way of knowing that it was the same Citroën he had heard in the wood at the chateau, but he knew it was his best lead. He turned to Rosannah.
“Can I borrow your scarf?” She handed it to him without hesitation and he spoke softly to them both.
“There’s a possibility the same people who tried to disable the truck are going to try to disable the ship. If you see Arontowitz, warn him to check the rudder. But there may not be time – I’m going to try to see if I can head them off before they can do any damage.” And without giving them time to ask any questions, he wrapped the scarf around the lower part of his face, opened the door and dropped down onto the mole.
>
Then he was running steadily, gradually increasing his pace as he swept around the corner of the Old Basin and along the narrow roadway beside the canal, with the town sloping gently up the hill to his left and the President Garfield down the harbour to his right. He could see the Citroën ahead of him now, parked beside a concrete shed, and he prayed as he ran that the two SOE men were not already in the water, swimming across the harbour with the limpet mine ready for its target.
But there they were emerging from the shed in their wetsuits, scuba masks on their foreheads, heading towards an iron ladder to clamber into the water. Without thinking he pulled the gun from his waistband and fired – not directly at them but over their heads. Powell dived sideways into the dock but Wylie, who was holding the mine, stood motionless, uncertain what to do. Forrester thrust the gun into his pocket, freeing his hands so that as he cannoned into Wylie and the man’s grip on the mine momentarily loosened, Forrester was able to rip it from his fingers and with the same movement knock him backwards into the oily water.
As Wylie went in Forrester saw Powell rise from the water with something in his hand, and knew it was the remote control that would detonate the mine, and in the same split instant he flung it with both hands as far as he could into the harbour in the opposite direction to the President Garfield. Seconds later there was a massive explosion and a huge fountain of water rose gracefully into the air. Powell ripped the mask from his face.
“You bastard!” he screamed. “You are a dead man.”
18
DEAD MAN RUNNING
In fact, Forrester did not run far, because as excited voices began to call out all over the harbour, and Powell and Wylie struggled to get back out of the water, he realised the perfect means of escape lay right at hand.
The Citroën still stood beside the concrete shed, and as he had anticipated, planning a quick getaway, they had left it unlocked. He reached under the dashboard and forced himself to be methodical as he exposed and reconnected the wires, knowing as he did so that the two ex-SOE men were at that moment hauling themselves over the edge of the dock. By the time the engine was turning over they were racing not towards him but to the shed where they had left their weapons. Seconds later, as he put the car into gear, they re-emerged, firing as they came.
The first bullet slammed into the windscreen, forcing him to reverse wildly along the edge of the water. In the distance, out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of frenetic activity around the President Garfield as Arontowitz, knowing they were under attack, desperately tried to get the last of the refugees on board.
He saw the bollards behind him in the nick of time, slammed on the brakes and spun the car round – bringing him, for a moment, broadside to his enemies. It was in that moment that a bullet smashed through the right-hand window and out again through the left. Afterwards Forrester would have sworn he saw it pass before his eyes, but he knew that was impossible and besides, at the time, he was thinking of nothing but getting the Traction Avant up the ramp that led from the docks into the town at the full sixty-five miles an hour of which it was capable. With a squeal of tyres he spun around the steeply sloping corner and up the road into Sète.
He had stolen a Citroën TA during the war, and thoroughly enjoyed driving it. When it had been introduced in 1934 the idea of making the body and chassis one welded steel unit instead of bolting them together was revolutionary and led to much head-shaking: Citroën had literally had to drive a test model off a cliff to prove it was safe. But the method saved about a hundred and fifty pounds of steel and allowed the car to be both economical and fast: as Forrester knew from experience he could get at least twenty-five miles to the gallon.
He just wished he could see out of the windscreen properly. As soon as he could he pulled over in a side street, ripped the scarf from his face and wrapped it around his hand to smash out the bullet-scarred glass; then he wound down the side windows so the damage wasn’t visible there either. As he did so he heard the familiar hee haw of French police sirens and he saw the police van, its blue light flashing, race past the end of the street down towards the docks.
Unless Powell and Wylie had got out of the way quickly, he thought, they would have a lot of explaining to do. And as he formulated the word exclaiming in his mind a new idea sprang into being. An idea which might just save his career.
He went round to the back of the car and opened the boot and there, as he had suspected, was the MI6 radio transmitter. He shut the boot again, restarted the car, and drove out of Sète, thinking hard.
On the one hand he had burnt his boats and set himself against his own government. He had twice disrupted an MI6 sabotage operation and the ex-SOE men MI6 had employed could firmly identify him from their first encounter even if they could not be so certain about the second. It had been a conscious, considered act and he was quite prepared to take the consequences – which would probably be, the moment he set foot in Britain, arrest, prison and disgrace. He was prepared for that.
On the other hand, if he could avoid prison and disgrace he would do so, and a plan was beginning to form in his mind. Once Powell and Wylie told their story to their controllers in London, a warrant would be issued for his arrest as soon as he landed, with everything that would follow.
But at present, because he had stolen their car and had their radio equipment, they could not tell their story, and everything Forrester had experienced during the war had taught him that the first version of an operation to get into circulation tended to become the official one. Only later, and gradually, would it be modified with more information. And now, thanks to the radio transmitter, he could shape the narrative.
He was heading along the coast towards Narbonne now, with the general idea of turning north-west towards Toulouse, but he took a side road to Montredon-des-Corbières, pulled off the road into a small wood and took out the radio set. He had used this model so often during his overseas operations that turning it on was like meeting an old friend. To his relief it was already tuned to the frequency being used for the operation by MI6, and as soon as the night operator came on and asked for his call-sign he began to speak rapidly, without giving the man any chance to ask questions.
“Listen, my name is Duncan Forrester – for my bona fides check with Toby Lanchester repeat Toby Lanchester in Foreign Office Security. I’m using this set to let you know the two operatives on the President Garfield expedition have been arrested by the French police in Sète. I took their transmitter to prevent it falling into French hands. I’m using it now to warn you that the sabotage operation has been aborted and your men are in French hands. Over and out.”
And with that he shut down the set, slammed the boot shut, and got back in the car. He had no idea, of course, whether Powell and Wylie had actually been arrested, but if it proved to be wrong he could easily explain how he had come to believe they had been. And if they were in French hands the period needed for them to explain their guns, their wetsuits and the mysterious explosion in the Old Basin might just give him long enough to get back to England, report to Lanchester and elaborate his story. By the time Powell and Wylie got back it would be their word against his as to whether he was the man who had rushed down the quayside and thrown their limpet mine into the dock or whether he had just, as he claimed, taken the car and radio to avoid getting them into further trouble. As to what had happened at the chateau, he would think of something. Anything. He did not much care what.
The fact was that as he drove the sleek, powerful car through the fresh, scented night of southern France, he felt, for the first time in a long time, a free man. Ever since Templar had asked for his help and Ernest Bevin had drafted him into his security detail he had felt directed by forces outside himself; forces, he had to admit, he’d welcomed as a distraction from the malaise that had infected his soul since the parting with Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig, but outside forces nevertheless. He had been doing what people had expected of him, what he felt obliged to do. He had been, in effect, obey
ing orders.
But since that moment at the chateau when he had seen the huddled children and had decided that whatever Ernest Bevin and the British government wanted he would do what he thought was right, he had felt liberated. The decisions were his to make, not other people’s. As a result, his misleading call to MI6 headquarters had not felt like making excuses – it had felt like setting himself up as his own authority. As if he was announcing to the powers that be that he, Forrester, was setting the terms of engagement for their future relations. He might still lose his fellowship, his reputation and his liberty, but what mattered was that he was, once again, his own master. He also knew, at some deep level, that the threads that linked the murders of Templar, Burke and Loppersum were now in his hands, even if he could not yet see them clearly, and that when the time came, with one tug, he would be able to pull them together.
Forrester weighed his options as he drove north-west, and decided that his best course was to behave as if he had nothing to hide. Accordingly, he drove straight to the offices of the British consulate in Bordeaux, where he gave a circumspect account of how he had lost his passport, implied that it had happened in the course of confidential government business, and asked for emergency travel documents.
As news was already filtering through of the fracas at Sète involving British personnel, the consul knew he would be well advised to get any possible agent out of France as soon as possible. Accordingly, while Forrester snatched a few minutes’ rest and was given a cheese sandwich by the consul’s kindly wife, the consul himself produced a new passport at great speed and loaned him enough money to pay for the ferry crossing, so that within half an hour Forrester was driving the Citroën towards the ferry terminal. He had considered abandoning it, but then he would have had to get rid of the radio transmitter, or risk it being found by the French police and thus occasioning more embarrassment to the British government. He decided, in the end, that with Britain’s foreign exchange reserves as low as they were, there might be some gratitude for him returning an expensive piece of equipment. It was a bargaining chip, and he knew he would need every bargaining chip he could lay his hands on if he was to save himself.