Night Action (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  “And they’ll soon be knocking on the front door.” McNab’s eyes lifted to the torn ceiling and he muttered, “Come on, laddie, we’re running out o’ time.”

  *

  Suzanne stooped under the angled roof of the house and wondered which one of the buildings it was. The third — or fourth? Paul lay at her feet, Michel and Louis kneeling beside him. There was room to stand upright in the centre of this attic but they were tucked in a corner under the roof-beams, away from the shattered dormer window that was a square of grey light. That was because a stray shot sometimes came close to, or in at, the window. They were also well clear of the hole, roughly circular and a yard in diameter, blasted in the wall leading to the next house.

  A commando crouched to one side of the window and now another, Phil, crawled back through the hole into the attic and to one side of it. He set down his rucksack and squatted by the wall.

  Suzanne asked him, “Have you seen any people in these houses?” Because Phil was always first through a newly-blasted passage into the next attic. She glanced at the small, empty bed standing opposite the window, a crucifix at its head, the sheets thrown back.

  Phil shook his head. “Not a soul. Lucky for them.”

  Suzanne thought that was as they had expected: anyone sleeping up here had gone down to the cellars when the bridge was blown and the shooting started.

  Phil put his hands over his ears and Suzanne covered her own. She felt the kick of the explosion through her shoes then the dust boiled out of the hole in the wall in a huge cloud. When it cleared Phil lifted his rucksack and crawled through the gap again but reappeared only seconds later to call to the man by the window, “Tell McNab to get up here!” He beckoned to Suzanne, Michel and Louis lifted Paul between them and all four worked their way through the hole in the wall into the attic of the next building in the row.

  *

  David Brent had Albert with him now as the ragged column emerged from the wood, crossed a stretch of wasteland and came to the old port. There were gardens at the backs of houses but the old Frenchman led the way to an alley between them that opened on to a narrow street. The column snaked to the right then, heading towards the sea and passing through a shadowed canyon, its walls the fronts of houses. Their windows were shuttered and not a light showed. The people behind them were waiting for the firing to stop and the light of morning before they came out.

  The escorts around the column were tense, fingers on triggers and eyes hunting in the darkness, probing each side street as they hurried across its mouth. The firing was very close now, seeming to come from just the other side of these houses that sheltered them. The children straggled down the axis of the column following Max Neumann. If they wept or cried out, they were not heard.

  Grundy and Cullen were still at the tail, heads continually turning to sweep arcs from front to rear. The snake ahead bent again, but left this time, and the two at the tail followed it round. Now on their right there was a chest-high wall a yard thick and beyond it lay the sea. A hundred yards ahead of them the column had halted, the children showing in the night as a low, packed crowd between the stone wall and another, on the left and higher, that seemed to bound the yard of the last house in a row. Grundy and Cullen could see the backs of the houses running away to their left. Beyond the huddled children lifted the rear of another house but this one looked out on the sea. And sliding in towards the harbour mouth, just seen over the stone wall, was the mast-head of a ship with two big yellow lamps hung glowing at the yard-arms. Grundy and Cullen exchanged glances: nearly there.

  They were closing on the rest of the halted column and passing the mouth of one last alley when Grundy yelled, “Left!” He fired and Cullen was blinded by the flash. He could not see the shadows moving among the others in the alley but he raised his carbine and squeezed the trigger. Grundy shoved him, stumbling and falling, into the cover of the wall beyond the alley’s mouth, then shouted, “Rapid! Keep ‘em down!”

  Cullen squirmed around, poked his head and the carbine around the corner and fired into the darkness. Flashes sparked back at him and he knew he was being fired at, was deafened by Grundy’s carbine slamming quickly above his head.

  Brent and Tallon stood at the back door of the house. They, too, had seen the mast-head and the lights. They spun around now as the firing broke out but saw the corporal who had blown the bridge running back with two of his men to where Grundy and Cullen held the alley. Then a gun barked rapidly somewhere in the harbour, stopped, fired again, stopped, then let off one last burst that ended with a fusillade of rifle and machine-gun fire.

  Tallon, ears ringing, mouthed: Jimmy Nash. Brent nodded, praying that Jimmy was all right.

  The door did not budge when they tried it; it rested thick and solid in its frame, a storm door meant to keep out the sea when the big rollers broke over the wall. The windows on either side of the door were shuttered but Brent yanked at one of them and the catch inside tore loose. The shutters opened. Tallon smashed the glass of the window with the stock of his Thompson, reached in a hand, unhooked the latch and slid up the window.

  For a second they listened but could hear nothing in the house because of the cracking of carbines and the rattle of Thompson guns only a score of yards away where commandos had joined Grundy and Cullen in firing into the alley. Brent pushed aside the curtains drawn across the window and swung his legs over the sill to stand in the room beyond. Tallon followed. They saw at once that the room was not completely dark. In the gloom they made out four chairs around a table, two camp beds along one wall and above them four packs hung from hooks. Tallon thought: Guardroom. So where was the guard? And where was the light coming from?

  He was only a yard behind Brent as he crossed to the door. It was open and there was a passage outside, lit by a shifting radiance. The room behind them was filling with commandos, Johnson, the German speaker, first of all. Brent moved into the passage and looked into the room opposite: a huge kitchen. He could see it in detail by the red gleam that seeped out around the door of the big, old stove. But the wavering light in the passage came from another source.

  They sought it, following the passage that gave onto a hall. A staircase climbed up from it but their eyes were on the room to the left. They saw armchairs around a fire in a grate, the flames casting shadows on the walls, and there were glasses standing on the mantelpiece above. The room was empty.

  Ilse, at the head of the cellar stairs, saw them pass stealthily along the passage. When the explosion had rocked the house and the firing started she had run up to her own room because she would have a better view of the quay from the upper floor. She had to know what was happening outside, to her father. She peered fearfully around the curtains and saw the muzzle flashes all around the harbour and close by on the quay. There were soldiers taking cover behind the steps of one of the buildings and a lean figure crouching among them that she recognised as that of Erwin König.

  Sometimes a bullet from the S.S. headquarters cracked against the wall of her house so she retreated to the hall below. The lights had gone out with the explosion. She hoped, though doubted, that the cause might only be blown fuses so she went to the door of the cellar under the main staircase. She pulled it open, found the torch hanging on the wall inside and descended the steps by its light. The cellar held some stocks of vegetables, racks of wine and the furniture moved out of the guardroom to make space for the guard’s table and beds. There was a couch and two armchairs, all covered with dust sheets and they stood in a far corner almost hidden by the wine racks.

  Ilse did not like the cold cellar, its dust and shadows. She went quickly to the box on the wall. She knew a little about fuses; one had blown a month or so ago and the old French electrician sent to her aid had shown her how he changed it. She inspected the fuses now and accepted what she had suspected, that this was a total failure of power.

  She climbed back to the door but stopped there as she heard another stray bullet ricochet around the front room where she had
sat with Ritter and Erwin König. She decided she was safer where she was and sat on the top stair, hands to her mouth, her fear still for her father, until she heard, faintly, the tinkling of breaking glass from the back of the house. That brought her to her feet. She heard movement in the guardroom a few yards down the passage, switched off the torch and pulled the cellar door to, leaving only a crack. She peered through it, heart thumping.

  The two men prowled like hunting animals into the light of the passage. One carried a pistol in his hand, the other a submachine-gun. They darted glances about them, eyes glittering, but did not see her where she stood with the stillness of terror behind the almost closed door. They were the enemy. In her house. She was alone and the pistol her father had left her was still in the desk.

  They passed from her sight. Ilse closed the door softly and tip-toed down the steps. She halted at the foot of them because here the darkness was total and she could not see a hand before her face. Dare she use the torch? That was decided when she heard a skittering in the cellar and she kept the beam pointed down, sweeping the floor as she crossed to the far corner. She pulled the dust-sheet from the couch, shone the torch underneath it and then sat down. She could barely hear the firing now; it was very quiet in the cellar and there was no more skittering. She thought she might have imagined it. Or it was just a draught fluttering the dust sheets. The enemy would not come down here. They would not think of a cellar. She gradually became calmer, her trembling stopped, and she worried again for her father. She buried her face in her hands.

  *

  Commandos following Brent and Tallon worked their way, light-footed and cautious, through the house until Tallon, dogged by Johnson, joined Brent where he stood at a side window on the ground floor and reported, “It’s clear. I’ll lay a pound to a penny that’s the Oberst and his guard out on the quay. We’re holding the front.” That meant his men were stationed at all the windows facing along the quay.

  Brent said, “You’ve told them to hold their fire.”

  “They know, and why.” Because it was vital their presence in the house was not suspected for as long as possible. Chris peered over David’s shoulder. From here they looked out over the harbour mouth to the guardship and the drifter alongside her. Smoke hung in a pall over them, so while Tallon thought he could see the scurrying, stooping figures of men on their decks he could not be sure.

  David had drawn the curtain aside and now he stepped back a pace from the window so the beam would be seen only from the two vessels and not from inside the harbour. He worked the switch on the torch, then waited.

  A commando trotted up behind them and told Tallon, “All in the two back rooms.” He was talking of the children — and the little man Tallon and Brent had come for — now crowded into the house. “Covering party is up in the attic.”

  Tallon nodded. “The others are due any minute. See how those at the back are getting on.” As the man hurried away Chris wondered how many would be with McNab and the girl.

  But now he held his breath as an answering light flickered aboard the drifter and Brent read: “Guardship taken.” Tallon let out the breath in a sigh of relief, but Brent was going on: “I — am — sinking.”

  Tallon swallowed, then said thickly, “The drifter was supposed to take us off. The two M.T.B.s can’t take all of us, not that crowd in the back room.” He remembered their faces. Leave them now?

  David Brent could see those faces but did not answer. He stared out at the drifter, taking in the signal and its significance, then thinking, remembering what Suzanne had told him of the guardship. He lifted the torch and worked its button again.

  The house quivered to a muffled explosion above them and Tallon said, “That sounds like McNab.” He hurried away with Johnson following him.

  Jimmy Nash peered across the mouth of the harbour at the house on the end of the quay and the tiny spot of light that winked at him. It ceased and he spun on his heel, shouted up to Tommy Vance on the deck of the guardship, “You’ve got your engineer aboard there?” Then as Tommy acknowledged with a lift of his hand, “Fetch him!”

  *

  “Sarge! Come on up!” The call came from the attic.

  McNab, standing on the landing below, heard the message he had been waiting for and bellowed, “Everybody upstairs!” He counted them as they came back from the front and rear windows, and passed him to climb the steep stairs to the attic above. He followed the last man, crossing the floor of the attic, ducking to work his way through the hole in the wall into the next building in the row, then the next, until he came to the room where all his men were stooped under the angled roof beams, along with Suzanne and the rescued prisoners.

  Phil stood a few paces from the rift in the wall and McNab glowered at him. “You took your time.”

  Phil only grinned, teeth white in a face coated with a paste of dust and sweat. He lifted his hands to cover his ears and the others copied him. The floor shook and dust squirted from the hole like steam under pressure. As it drifted aside and settled Phil ducked through the rift and crossed the attic beyond. There was a new, raw fissure a yard wide and nearly the height of a man cut in the wall ahead of him. A voice challenged hoarsely from the darkness on the other side, “Who’s there?”

  “Phil, with McNab and the rest.”

  “Come on in.”

  But Phil stood aside as Louis and Michel eased Paul’s loose body through the gap and Suzanne followed. They were in the house of the military commander of St. Jean and Suzanne thought that David Brent should be here. Had to be.

  McNab counted his men again as they filed after the girl, their faces expressionless and eyes staring. He thought that they were showing the strain now. Then he turned on Phil, down on his knees on the floor and delving deep into the rucksack. “How long are you going to be?”

  “Couple of minutes. I want to make a proper job of this one.”

  McNab said, “I’ll keep an eye open in case we get company.” He went back to the hole through which he had come and knelt there with his Thompson.

  *

  The Gefreiter pinned down in the alley with his three men turned his head as a burst of rifle-fire came from behind him, but it was directed at the S.S. headquarters. He called, “Somebody’s got around behind them!” It was Kurt Ritter’s young Leutnant and his assault troops, shaking from exertion and the freezing wet clothes dragged onto their bodies after swimming the river.

  The firing from in front of the Gefreiter, at the end of the alley by the sea-wall, intensified now in response to that of the Leutnant’s party. The Gefreiter hugged the ground behind the stack of logs that was the only cover he and his men had. He shouted, “One of us has to tell that Major on the quay about these Tommis back here!” He had said that twice already, given a direct order, but no one had moved. He had screwed up his courage to try to cross the alley himself, but his legs would not obey him.

  Erwin König, at the front of the house, stared along the quay and said abruptly, “Their fire’s slackening.” And now no muzzle flashes showed at the windows of the S.S. headquarters.

  A man broke from cover at the far end of the quay and ran, crouching and weaving, across the open ground. Another followed him and they flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the front door of the headquarters. Kurt Ritter recognised that weaving run, was certain they were his assault troops. He saw their hands go back and the grenades lobbed in at the door. Seconds later there was a stab of flame and a double explosion. The two men by the door plunged inside and more came running across to it.

  Ritter said grimly, “Now we go.” And to the soldiers kneeling around him: “On your feet.”

  But Erwin König frowned, “Strange. No tiles fell that time.” Ritter paused and König’s gaze ran along the row of buildings. Tiles had fallen at intervals all through the action, from the roofs of the buildings in front of him, alongside — they crunched under his boots — and finally behind him. He had assumed they fell because of grenades but they
had cascaded down in succession. In that order. His head went back as he shouted, “They’ve broken through the attics of the houses! Bombed their way!”

  Ritter leapt up the steps of the building and disappeared inside. König started to run back to his house, throwing over his shoulder at the men of his guard, “Follow me!” The scything fire from his own windows kicked sparks from the quay and ricochetted around him. Instinctively he swerved aside, fell and rolled into the cover of another flight of steps.

  Kurt Ritter, pounding up the stairs, reached their head but then the blast hurled him back, bouncing and rolling to lie winded and dazed as the dust boiled about him.

  Erwin König lay with his arms over his head as the rubble crashed onto the quay. Only when the last brick had fallen did he wipe dirt from his eyes and squint blearily up at the building at the end of the row and next to his house. The upper floor had gone and now there was a ragged gap silhouetted against the night sky. His house now stood alone. The enemy held it — and his daughter.

  Chapter Fourteen - The cellar

  Tallon was making his rounds of the house, starting with the defenders at the rear who held the end of the alley. Cover was more precious than ever to them now because the last building in the row had caught fire following the explosion that ripped away its upper floor. The flames lit Grundy, Cullen and the commandos who had to show themselves around a corner or above a heap of rubble to shoot into the alley. They breathed through open mouths and the firelight cast shadows in their hollow cheeks. They were holding against more than a dozen men now the young Leutnant’s party had worked up towards them, and they were paying the price.

  Chris Tallon said, “Won’t be long now.”