by Alan Evans
He found Tallon behind the house, counting his men as they fell back from their defensive positions. Johnson was with him and Brent wondered what would happen to the interpreter if he was captured. He had a good idea how the Germans would treat one of their own caught in an enemy uniform. Johnson had taken that risk from the start of this operation, but he could serve no purpose here now. Brent told Tallon with a jerk of the head towards Johnson, “We’ll get him aboard.”
Johnson went with him as David hurried Suzanne to the sea-wall, a hand gripping her arm. The sail had been secured as a makeshift chute from the wall to the deck of the guardship. The last of the children were sliding down it, lifted onto it by Grundy and Cullen. Some of them shrieked but most were too terrified by the clamour of the fighting, the glare from the burning house and the sight of the glittering black sea around the guardship below. When they bumped onto the deck they were grabbed by the waiting seamen and manhandled below, with rough gentleness but rapidly, steadily, like so much cargo.
Brent shoved Johnson after them, picked up Suzanne and swung her over the wall, let her go. He lifted his head and saw the two boats, or rather the soaring arcs of red tracer that marked where they cruised back and forth a quarter-mile out in the darkness. Dent and Crozier had their gunners sweeping the old port and the houses behind. They were under fire themselves from the gun on the headland; Brent could see the distant winking of flame at its muzzle and the silver-grey waterspouts lifting where the shells fell alongside or astern of the boats.
“Last of them coming now!” Chris Tallon shouted that, standing at Brent’s side but facing back towards the houses, his Thompson at his shoulder. Men came running from the end of the alley and out of the back door of the house, the tall figure of McNab trotting behind them.
Brent called to Grundy and Cullen, “Cast off and get aboard!”
Grundy shouted, “Watch them other fellers forrard! Make sure they get away!” Cullen obeyed, saw the men flip the forward line loose and go down to the ship. Then he felt Grundy’s hand on his back, heard the cox’n’s voice in his ear, “Your turn now, chum!” Cullen swung over the wall and Grundy followed him.
Brent stood with Chris Tallon through those last seconds as the lines securing the guardship fell away and the men rolled over the wall. He emptied his pistol at the end of the alley as Chris fired short bursts from the Thompson, then, last of all, they dropped down to the deck of the guardship as she swung away from the wall and her bow pointed seawards.
*
Erwin König was first into the house after the firing stopped. His troops waited in the alley and on the quay as he had ordered: “Tell them to stay back and hold their fire. Ilse is in there and nobody else.” Ritter was not prepared to gamble on König’s certainty and would not let him go in alone. He walked at the shoulder of the Herr Oberst and carried a machine-pistol, cocked and ready but trained on the floor.
They paced through the house, littered with rubble and broken glass, stinking of burnt cordite and smoke. They heard the singing before they came to the kitchen, a hoarse, high, quavering voice, and they found Ilse curled in a corner, torchlight on her face. Erwin König lifted her and she clung to him.
Kurt Ritter went out of the back of the house to the sea-wall. No tracer looped in from out of the darkness. The gun on the headland had ceased firing, no longer having the tracer for an aiming point. The guardship and the other boats had gone. The sea was empty.
Blowing the bridge and isolating the old port had been a master-stroke. Ritter felt doubt for the first time. His battalion was on its way to Russia where the Wehrmacht stood at the gates of Moscow and victory seemed inevitable. But now he wondered.
He returned to the house and found the Oberst stripping off his greatcoat to wrap it around his daughter. König glanced at Ritter, “Get hold of a runner and send a signal back to the barracks for general transmission: Enemy evacuated — no, better say ‘driven out of’ — St. Jean — put in the time — taking guardship and believed with two Schnellboote.”
They exchanged cynical grins over the amendment, knowing an ill-chosen phrase could cost an officer his command, but Ritter printed the signal neatly in his notebook, ripped out the page and looked for a man to carry it. He would have to be ferried across the river and then get a truck to lift him to the barracks and the wireless there. Ritter thought bitterly: Slamming the stable door.
*
Rudi Halder had searched along the Tommis’ probable course until his three boats were nearer to England than to France, then swept back and forth across that course, waiting and listening. He had not found them. He had never believed he would. The bright boys back at base had cocked it up. Logic told him that by now the motor torpedo boats would be out of his reach; whatever operation they had carried out on the coast they had completed and gone home by a different route. He had lost them and he would have to be content with that one confirmed sinking, the boat that had burned.
That was logic. But stubbornness, or instinct, told him otherwise. There was something wrong, in his reasoning or the pattern of the night’s events. He shifted uneasily and Bruno Jacobi, standing at his shoulder, said, “Coffee?”
Rudi snapped at him, “No! And be quiet! There’s too much talking going on!”
There was no talking, only an occasional murmur from one of the gunners forward or aft. They had been stopped and listening like that for the past fifteen minutes, the three boats lying in a spread line, one either side of Rudi and just visible. But Bruno knew his captain and did not argue; he eased quietly back on the bridge to leave Rudi alone. The old man had got his back up because they had missed the Tommis. So keep out of his way.
Rudi scowled out over the screen at the heaving sea. Something wrong... Again he recalled the sequence of events: the pick-up of the agent by the M.T.B.s, his own first ambush, the action with the fishing fleet, the burning boat and the ambush the Tommis laid for Gunther — He stopped there, and asked himself: Why Gunther? They didn’t know about him, only of Rudi’s boats. So the trap had been laid for himself?
Of course. But why was it set up at all? Why hadn’t the boats gone home with the agent they had come for? What operation could they —
Why boats? When one would have sufficed to recover one agent? Or put another ashore. With four boats they could have lifted off a score or more but there wouldn’t be a score so —
Lift off — or land?
He swore and demanded, “Signal pad!” And when Bruno hurriedly passed it to him he printed rapidly: BELIEVE ENEMY FORCE ESTIMATED 30 MEN LANDED NORTH OF ST. JEAN. He turned to shove the pad at Bruno, “Send that.” Instead he found the signalman facing him, holding out a flimsy like the one he had just filled in. He snatched it and read: ST. JEAN UNDER ATTACK... He skimmed through the rest of it then ground the signal he had written into a ball inside his clenched fist and hurled it over the side. “Start up!”
It would take him more than an hour at full speed to get back to his home port.
Chapter Fifteen - In the sunlight
David Brent wondered if they would get away with it.
The guardship was an hour out of St. Jean and plugging along at a thumping eight knots as the engineers below demanded all the old engines could give. Brent, in the wheel-house, could feel the vibration through the gratings under his feet. Grundy was at the wheel, Cullen standing at the back of the bridge. The French skipper of the drifter was down on the deck with his two-man crew. It was one thing to let him steer his own boat, knowing how she would respond, but this ship was not his and Brent did not want the problems of translation while conning her. They were not yet home and dry.
The deck was littered with the bodies of seamen and commandos, sheltering behind the cover of the bulwarks. Some were stretched out and sleeping, others seated with heads hanging, nodding then jerking awake, but all held their weapons. Chris Tallon moved among them, exchanging a word here and there, but Private Johnson stood in the wheel-house. Brent had given his orders as soon
as they were clear of St. Jean, and one had been that Johnson should be at his side.
Crozier and little Dent cruised astern but at some distance and unseen in the night. One deadlight had been left open a crack in the guardship’s after cabin, letting out a sliver of light for the M.T.B.s to keep station. Jimmy Nash, Tommy Vance and two gunners worked around the 40mm. gun on the foredeck, practising a drill for loading and firing.
There were no prisoners. Jimmy Nash had put the guardship’s crew aboard the sinking drifter in the harbour of St. Jean and left them her boat to ferry themselves to the quay. The drifter had been settling surely but only slowly and they would have reached the shore dry-shod.
Jimmy strode aft from the gun now and said, “They’re getting into the swing of it.”
Chris Tallon came to stand beside him below the wheel-house and reported, “They’re ready.” He glanced around at the supine figures then his teeth showed in a tired grin. “You wouldn’t think so, but they’ll stand to if we give the word.” He felt numb, as if he watched himself doing what had to be done, driven on by this man above him in the doorway of the wheel-house.
Brent looked down at them. The darkness hid their faces but the loose slouch of their shoulders told the tale of their weariness. He could hear it in their voices, husky, thick.
They were ready. Brent thought that the E-boats had not been seen since the landing. They had not returned to St. Jean so they were still at sea. Somewhere out there... He pulled off his cap, rubbed at the tousled, sweat-flattened black hair and jammed the cap on again. “Keep shaking them up.” So Tallon and Jimmy Nash turned stiffly and went back to the men and the gun.
Tommy Vance and his men had got the hang of it, the laying, training and firing. He wondered if the gun would be needed, hoped it would not. But just before the landing party went ashore by the cape he had voiced his doubts to Brent, that the E-boats they had first encountered were still prowling in the night. Brent had acknowledged that but gone on with the landing. Tommy had done as he was told and held his tongue. But Brent had remembered; his orders once they were away from St. Jean had shown that.
Brent asked Cullen, “Have you got that light handy?” His own voice sounded hoarse, slurred. He saw the glance he got from Grundy, eyes flicking quickly from compass to Brent’s face then back again.
And he heard the odd note in Cullen’s reply, “Aye, aye, sir.”
Brent knew that he was as tired as any of them. He had asked Cullen about the signal lamp before. Twice. He remembered now and rubbed at his face, feeling the rasp of the stubble.
Suzanne said, “I came up for some air. It’s crowded down there.”
He saw her standing on the deck by the wheel-house; he had not seen her come up from below. She would need the air; the accommodation below deck was filled with children, crammed in cabins, curled up in passages, even packed into the tiny galley. He asked, “Is Neumann all right?” Because he was the reason for it all.
“He’s asleep. I got him into a bunk with a blanket.”
Brent was still thinking about E-boats with a part of his mind but he climbed down to stand beside her, said what was now foremost in his thoughts: “I used to think about you. All the time.” And he had pictured her clearly in his mind.
Suzanne looked out over the sea creaming along the guardship’s rusty side. “Angry? Bitter?”
“Both. But not now that I know.” Just — alone. She had made her vows — and broken them once, that was true — but it would not happen again, Brent was certain.
She confirmed that: “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell you that day you went away.” Her head turned to look up at him, “There’s a nasty word for what I’d done. I’d been unfaithful but I didn’t want to dirty the time we’d had. I didn’t want to remember it that way. I wasn’t ashamed. I’d married him for better or worse, but if he had not suffered the accident I would have left him. I wasn’t forgiving. I was bitter.”
She stopped and used the back of her hand to rub salt spray from her face, then blinked and went on, “As it was — well, he needed me. I was told in so many words that I was his only hold on life. He lived from one of my visits to the next. He died the day the Germans marched into Paris but he knew nothing of that. I arranged the funeral then came down to Normandy.”
It was some seconds before he took in what she was saying, then he reached out to hold her by the arms, turning her to face him…
“Light! Starboard bow!” That was Jimmy Nash standing just forward of the bridge. Brent saw it, a flicker of morse, and he called up to Cullen, “Give him BM!” Remembering the challenge or reply Jimmy Nash had told him he’d seen when the E-boats fired on each other after Brent had landed north of St. Jean. He thrust the girl away, “Get into cover!” As he swung up into the wheel-house Cullen was working the signal lamp, the reply stuttering out in longs and shorts. Brent prayed it was the right reply and saw the gun forward swinging on its mounting as Tommy Vance trained it out to starboard.
Brent stared out into the darkness, holding his breath, but no burst of fire ripped across the black sea. It seemed the reply had been correct and Jimmy’s voice came up from below the wheel-house: “Looks like it worked.” Then Jimmy moved aft to stand right in the stern. That had been in Brent’s orders.
The E-boats came into sight and thundered in out of the night. One moment they were just vague silhouettes picked out by the grey “ram’s horns” under their bows, then the next the silhouettes hardened and the grey turned into the silver of bow-wave and wake.
There were three of them, running in a flat echelon. They swept past by a cable’s length, two hundred yards, but slowing, turning to swing around the guardship’s stern. Brent called, “Port side, Tommy!” But Vance was already traversing the gun around to cover the E-boats. Brent reached past Grundy to grab the German skipper’s cap from where it hung on a hook near the wheel. He shoved it at Private Johnson and told him, “Put that on. And use this.”
Johnson set the cap on his head and took the tin mega-phone. Cullen wondered: What the hell does he want that for? The leading E-boat had closed to within twenty yards of the guardship’s port side and had throttled back so the thunder of its engines was muted to a deep rumble. She ran well within easy hailing distance without using a megaphone.
Brent saw that the other two boats were keeping station on their leader but still that cable’s length beyond her and abreast of the guardship. They would not see the light in her stern now. He said, “All right, Jimmy.” And Nash stamped three times on the deck.
David Brent was thinking that the E-boat’s captain, if his flotilla was that out of St. Jean, would know the guardship — and her skipper. That was confirmed by the first question shouted across the narrow neck of white water: “Why are you at sea?” Johnson rapidly translated as David watched his enemy, the E-boat’s captain, standing tall and straight on his bridge but featureless in the night.
Johnson passed David’s muttered reply: “St. Jean has been raided. The Tommis landed a force of commandos and there was fighting in the port. It was reported they were taken off by drifter. We were ordered out to search for them.”
This only confirmed what Rudi already knew, except the evacuation by drifter. And now the earlier action near the fishing fleet fell into place in the pattern: the Tommis had been capturing a drifter to use in their operation. He thought absently that Ulrich’s voice sounded different, but it was coming out of that distorting megaphone. Rudi called, “You’re showing a light!”
“A light? Where?”
“At your stern. A scuttle hasn’t been properly secured.”
“Thanks. I’ll see to it.” The megaphone was lowered but Rudi still heard clearly the bark of the guardship’s skipper, “Fasten that damned scuttle aft!”
When Jimmy Nash had stamped on the deck the man stationed right under him in the after cabin had heard that signal above his head and started sending his own, closing and opening the deadlight so the crack of light showed short-long-s
hort-long.
Rudi could not see that as he stared across at the old armed drifter. The gun mounted forward in her bow was manned and trained out in his direction. There was nothing odd in that; he would similarly cover a strange vessel he closed in the night and his own guns were trained on the drifter now. But Ulrich’s voice —
He called softly to the crew of the 20mm. just below him in the bow, “Stand by!” He saw them glance up at him, startled by the harsh urgency in his tone, then tense over their gun. He raised his voice to hail the guardship’s skipper, “Werner! Was your wife hurt in the fighting?”
There was only one right answer to that question and Ulrich should ask, “Who is Werner?” Rudi saw the megaphone lifted —
Brent had his own suspicions when the question came, saw that it could be a trap. He decided he had to take it at face value and play the game out to the end — which might come at any moment. “Tell him she’s all right.”
But now Rudi turned as a voice called behind him, “Herr Kaleu!” The shortened, slang version of Kapitänleutnant.
He saw his wireless operator thrusting a signal flimsy at him. As he took it he heard the sudden harsh rattle of machine-gun fire above the rumble of his engines and spun around, shouting instantly, instinctively, “Full ahead!” He saw the chains of tracer, level and not looping because they were fired at close range and the targets were his own two boats cruising two hundred metres away on his port side. He saw the boats that were firing the tracer, beyond his two and moving at high speed, racing past them. He felt the surge of power under his feet, saw his guns forward and aft training around to port to face this new attack. He roared, “No! Starboard!” And flung out a pointing arm towards the guardship, knowing he was too late.