Night Flight to Paris

by David Gilman

‘Very well. Then his secrets died with him.’

  ‘Do you know what it was he had?’

  Bauer nodded. ‘Yes. Did he write anything down? Is that what you have in his stead?’

  Mitchell saw a glimmer of hope. If he admitted to knowing the information had been committed to paper then he might still have something to bargain. It was time to let the military intelligence officer know that he was aware of what Korte knew. ‘Tell me, colonel, would you have had the old man beaten until he told you? And when he had revealed those names you would have purged many more.’

  ‘Those names?’ Bauer smiled. ‘Then you do know. In answer to your question, I would not have harmed him unless exposure of that information to the wrong people demanded I do so. I would have kept him hidden for as long as possible.’

  Mitchell’s surprise was obvious.

  ‘You see, my name is on that list.’

  Mitchell was stunned. Oberst Ulrich Bauer of the Abwehr was part of a plot to overthrow Hitler.

  ‘And now you know too much, Herr Mitchell, and I am afraid it will end badly for you. Shall we have one last throw of the dice?’ He reached for his overcoat that lay across a chair and took out a sheaf of papers. ‘If you have those names written down then I will offer you an exchange.’ He handed to Mitchell the typed list that Hauptmann Martin Koenig had so diligently prepared. ‘Look for yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s a deportation list.’

  Mitchell’s eyes locked on his daughter’s name halfway down the page. La Santé was a fortress. His desire to find his daughter and organize her release had been little more than a wild hope. And here was her way out. They were opening the prison gates. He raised his eyes from the page. As long as Alfred Korte’s escape was kept from Bauer so that he continued to believe his secret was still secure, then London held the trump card. They could decide how best to use the list of potential allies within the hierarchy of the scientific community and German Officer Corps when the time came. It made no difference whether Bauer was given the list; what was important was that he believed the information could still fall into the hands of the Nazis.

  ‘It’s in code,’ he said.

  ‘Have you deciphered it?’ said Bauer eagerly.

  ‘I had no time. Alfred Korte gave it to me and said that if he died I should send it by courier to London.’

  Bauer studied him. ‘You swear that is the truth.’ He paused. ‘On your daughter’s life.’

  ‘On my daughter’s life,’ Mitchell said without hesitation because it was the truth.

  Bauer seemed satisfied. He stood and pulled on his overcoat. ‘I pray it is not too late to get her off that train.’

  ‘I am not going to tell you where it is hidden, colonel. My men have instructions to get it out of Paris if I do not return safely. The risk to you is that they will be caught and the list exposed before you get your hands on it.’

  ‘Then we must hurry. Get to Gare de Pantin before five. Bring the list before misadventure befalls us both.’

  ‘You expect me to show myself? If the SS or Gestapo are tipped off by any of your people then I am a dead man.’

  ‘I control this operation. Your wellbeing is now my guarantee. If you fear betrayal then you will make a copy for your people to be used should you and your daughter not return to them; that way we have a mutual interest in the success of this arrangement.’

  ‘And if there’s a copy then it can still be used against you,’ said Mitchell.

  ‘You must surely see that at this moment in time we are virtually allies. Your daughter for my own life.’ Bauer smiled. ‘The vagaries of war, Herr Mitchell. Let us behave well in this matter. Once my cipher officer has satisfied himself that it can be decoded and it is genuine then your daughter will be handed over to you. I will accept your word that any copy would be destroyed. Are we agreed?’

  ‘We are agreed.’

  69

  Mitchell had quickly put together a plan of escape for them all should the Abwehr colonel keep his word. Mitchell trusted no one but he had to risk doing what Bauer had suggested. His eyes burnt with tiredness as he studied the coded roll of paper in the airtight tube. All he needed was one line to make some sense and then he would know that whatever was written on the small scroll was genuine. Frank Burton had been contacted and told how a small miracle might have delivered Danielle into Mitchell’s hands but that he needed Burton’s help. Chaval and Laforge had been given instructions to travel to the American Hospital and to do exactly as Burton instructed. Roccu had closed his bar to give Mitchell peace and quiet to concentrate on his work and whenever he put his head around the door and saw Mitchell asleep, head on the bar, he shook him hard and poured more ersatz coffee laced with cognac into him. Time was short. Bauer would not be able to delay the train from leaving for the camps. Quotas had to be met in a timely fashion as all shipments of prisoners for the camps were monitored by Berlin.

  The rows of letters stared back at Mitchell. They blurred. He concentrated. Alfred Korte had been no cryptographer, so there had to be a reasonably simple explanation. Mitchell scratched out his efforts so far. He stopped glaring at the paper and leant back and closed his eyes. He did his best to rid his thoughts of his daughter, of the horror that awaited her should he fail to determine that the code was genuine and not a smokescreen. He drifted into a half-sleep. Eyes closed, he knew where he was, knew he was not fully asleep but hovering somewhere between slumber and wakefulness. Korte’s words came to him. The truth will set us free. They were the words of a devout man quoting a biblical passage, giving Mitchell the key. Numbers and letters blurred in his mind’s eye until he saw a pattern across three different columns. Mitchell was suddenly alert. He pushed letters and numbers across the block of garbled text until a name began to emerge. The name of an army general. Mitchell had no need to go any further. The code was genuine.

  *

  La Santé’s prison guards’ bellowing voices echoed across the upper and lower levels, ricocheting off the cells’ steel doors, calling for their charges to move out into the yard. The divisional officers herded their prisoners along as they murmured to each other, wondering whether there was to be an execution today. There had been no official announcement, but in the prison yard, the guillotine stood always ready for use to further terrorize those incarcerated in the fortress-like prison. Dominique Lesaux squinted in the daylight as she and hundreds of other prisoners reached the yard. Dirty and wretched and weakened from the appalling conditions and lack of nourishment, they stood in wavering rows as prison guards barked roll call for their respective wings. Satisfied that everyone was accounted for, the guards separated the men from the women and shepherded them towards La Santé’s imposing gate where they were loaded fifty at a time on to one of the sixty French city buses waiting in line.

  Dominique and Béatrice Claudel clasped hands for comfort. Béatrice had been sentenced to be guillotined at La Santé, but now, it seemed, this exodus had saved her. Dominique noticed one guard who seemed less aggressive than the others and she implored him to tell her where they were going. As he hurried them along he told them that the prisons were being emptied across the city and that she and the others were being sent to a concentration camp in the south run by the French. The glimmer of hope flared briefly but was soon extinguished when the guard told them that it would only be a stopover and that they were then being taken to Auschwitz or Ravensbrück. Dominique had kept her own dim candle of hope burning. Self-delusion was better than facing the harshness of what lay ahead.

  As they shuffled through the looming gates on to Rue de la Santé she peered up and down the street for a German staff car like the one she had travelled in so often with Stolz. Surely there was a grain of feeling in him? He had professed his affection over the years and she had not stopped hoping that he would relent and put her in a less vicious prison than La Santé. She had not had the opportunity to beg his forgiveness or deny the charges against her; she knew in her heart that she could have convinced him of her innocen
ce, despite any evidence to the contrary. She searched in vain. There were no Germans in sight. The French police had been ordered to carry out the deportation of their own citizens. Gendarmes armed with sub-machine guns lined the street as guards counted off blocks of prisoners clambering aboard the buses. As each bus filled, the doors closed and it rolled slowly forward and waited in the queue while another took its place. Only when the convoy was complete would the sixty buses bearing 2,500 inmates be driven through the city under the gaze of Parisians to Gare de Pantin where the death train awaited them.

  At the rail yard, the buses disgorged their human cargo and peeled away. German soldiers joined the gendarmes as boxcar doors slid open and the prisoners were forced aboard. There were no steps and barked shins and splintered hands had to be ignored as those who had the strength bent down to help the elderly, sick or injured to climb inside. Soldiers jabbed rifle butts, yelling at the deportees to be quicker. The engine had a head of steam and was hissing impatiently, waiting to haul its human shipment away from the City of Light and into a place of darkness. A cacophony of voices rose from the thousands being loaded, interspersed with the harsh shouts of the soldiers. Gendarmes lined the loading bays in case anyone broke free from the trackside. Despite the huge number of prisoners, the garrison troops forced the men and women inside the boxcars and then slid the doors closed. Dominique and Béatrice were in a final group being pushed and cajoled towards the suffocating wagons when she saw a German staff car arrive at the end of the track. Her hopes soared as she raised her arm and cried out. ‘Heinrich! I’m here! Heinrich!’

  A soldier struck her with his open hand across the back of her head, tumbling her forward on to the gravel. Her hands and knees were cut open, but she squirmed forward, trying to catch a glimpse through the prisoners’ legs of the German officer who had stepped out of the car.

  ‘Dominique!’ Béatrice shouted. Her friend had regained her feet, pushed her way into the open with failing strength and was running towards him. Tears blurred her eyes, veiling his identity. Another guard stepped out of the mêlée and swung his rifle butt, catching her on the side of her head. Pain shot through her; her face struck the gravel. In her final moments of consciousness, she clung to the dimming thought that when she woke Stolz would have saved her.

  The soldiers ordered the unconscious woman to be hauled on to the train. ‘Dominique! Dominique!’ Béatrice called out her name in desperation as she was pushed inside a boxcar two carriages away.

  Soldiers took a pace backwards as Oberst Ulrich Bauer walked down the line with an undisguised scowl of disgust. He found the army major in charge of the operation, who sat at a table collating the numbers. A brief exchange established that all the prisoners from La Santé had been accounted for but that it could not be established in which boxcar any single prisoner might have been placed. Bauer looked down the long line of boxcars just as the final doors were being closed.

  ‘Hold the train,’ said Bauer.

  The major hesitated. He was solely responsible for ensuring the train left on time but a colonel from military intelligence carried authority.

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  ‘Find a woman called Danielle Mitchell.’

  ‘How, sir? In these thousands?’

  ‘Do it,’ ordered Bauer.

  The train commander ran down to his subordinates and shouted his orders and they, in turn, called out to the soldiers, who went along the boxcars hitting the closed doors with their rifle butts, yelling Danielle’s name. Bauer watched impatiently. He looked towards the end of the platform where an ambulance was reversing into the loading area. Mitchell stepped out and stood looking down the length of the train. He turned his back, watching the soldiers, seeing the panic-stricken look on the train commander’s face as vital minutes ticked away. If the girl had not survived the abysmal conditions of La Santé before the prison was emptied there might not have been time to take her name off the list, but she might now be lying unconscious in one of the boxcars, already overcome by the overcrowded carriage. The major ran back towards Bauer.

  ‘She’s not here, colonel.’

  Bauer’s agitation was plain to see. ‘Wait here,’ he ordered. ‘The train does not leave until I give my permission.’ He strode towards Mitchell, who had stood back from the soldiers and gendarmes. The ambulance’s engine ticked over.

  Mitchell turned to Chaval and Laforge who sat in the cab dressed in medics’ uniforms. ‘Something’s wrong. If they take me, get out of here.’

  Bauer reached him. ‘You have it?’

  ‘Yes. Where’s my daughter?’

  ‘On that train, but we can’t find her and if I delay it much longer I will have the general – Karl Oberg himself – wanting to know why. I think she might be afraid of identifying herself. Us calling out using your name might be making her think that she is to be delivered for interrogation. Walk with me and let her hear your voice. Speak in French, Mitchell.’

  Mitchell nodded, shrugging off the trepidation of walking through the lines of soldiers. Bauer walked a couple of paces behind, his presence ensuring that no soldier barred their way.

  As he stood beside each boxcar Mitchell raised his voice. ‘Danielle, it’s your father. Answer me.’ Time and again he called her name until they were two-thirds of the way down the train. A faint voice answered.

  ‘Papa? It’s me. I am here.’

  Bauer gestured for the soldiers to open the door. Mitchell stepped back as the press of bodies nearly fell on to the tracks from the tightly packed wagon.

  ‘Danielle! Where are you?’

  Feet shuffled as prisoners tried to squeeze aside and the frail girl finally emerged, wary but with hopeful tear-filled eyes. Mitchell reached up for her and lifted her down into his arms. He buried his face into her matted hair and kissed her face, ignoring the stench of months of imprisonment. He gently hushed her sobbing and turned towards the waiting ambulance as Bauer ordered the boxcar to be closed again, then turned and gestured for his driver to follow him.

  When Chaval and Laforge saw Mitchell approaching they jumped down from the cab and pulled out the stretcher from the ambulance. Mitchell laid his daughter down gently. She clung to him, weeping with joy at seeing him, almost incoherent. Mitchell swallowed back his own emotions and, clasping her hands in his own, urged her to listen.

  ‘These are my friends and they are going to take you to hospital.’

  ‘Don’t leave me, Papa, please don’t leave me.’

  ‘I am going to be right behind you. I promise. Be strong for a while longer. Yes? Can you do that for me?’

  Danielle nodded through her tears but she clung to his hands. He eased her fingers aside and gently kissed them. ‘Be brave. It is over now.’

  She nodded and whispered, ‘Papa… you came for me…’

  Tears stung Mitchell’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said tenderly, ‘I came for you.’

  Epilogue

  Mitchell showed the codebreaker from Bauer’s own Abwehr unit Alfred Korte’s cipher, and once it was established that the code – and the list – was genuine both men were as good as their word. The exchange was complete. The locomotive gathered power, wheels spinning from the weight of its burden, and pulled away, leaving behind the stench of soot and despair clinging to the warm Parisian air. The soldiers and gendarmes dispersed, and now the two men looked about the desolate rail yard. The surge of human misery that had taken place there would always haunt their memories.

  ‘Get out of Paris, Herr Mitchell. I can give you forty-eight hours. After that, you and I are enemies once again and the SS and Gestapo will be on your tail. I cannot deliver to you the man who caused your family so much pain and grief. And if you took your revenge and killed him then the retribution against the civilian population would be savage. He is still powerful and has friends who could destroy me, given the opportunity. But I have information on him and one day, in months to come, when his arrogance makes him feel invulnerable, I will be the one to destroy him. His life
will be forfeit. That is the only consolation I can offer you.’

  ‘Thank you, colonel,’ said Mitchell. ‘Could I ask you one last favour?’

  ‘If it is within my power, yes.’

  ‘I’d like one of your cigarettes.’

  Bauer smiled and extended his cigarette case. Mitchell took one and held it to his nose, sniffing the quality tobacco. Bauer extended his lighter and the flame scorched the cigarette tip. Mitchell inhaled, coughed, and then inhaled again. ‘I might get used to these again,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  Bauer nodded. ‘You and your wireless operator are brave adversaries. Let us hope that in the future those of us who survive this war may find a common ground and regain that part of ourselves that we have had to sacrifice.’ He climbed into his staff car, tapped the driver’s shoulder and the car sped away from the empty rail yard.

  *

  The isolation ward for infectious diseases in the American Hospital was strictly out of bounds to everyone except for the courageous Dr Frank Burton and his few chosen, trusted staff. They cared for Danielle Mitchell there in secret. Nurses bathed her and gave her fresh clothes, and she spent the next thirty-six hours being treated for malnutrition and the skin diseases resulting from the squalid conditions in the lice- and rat-infested cells. Mitchell sat at her bedside for hours, patiently explaining everything that had happened since they had been parted. He had a plan, he told her, for when they left Paris, but he wanted her to be part of his decision.

  Chaval and Laforge made use of the hidden German uniform and stolen Peugeot and brought Ginny Lindhurst to the hospital. Within hours of Danielle being taken from the train what remained of the Maquis de Pascal was gathered in the isolation wing of the hospital while Frank Burton arranged new identity cards and the various papers needed for Mitchell and the others to escape the city. Ginny set up her radio and made brief transmissions to London with Mitchell’s plan for the future of operations in his region of France. Beaumont and Knight agreed with everything he suggested and began to prepare the escalation of covert warfare. Now that Korte had been safely delivered, British Intelligence had an insight into the dissatisfaction within the Nazi régime. Perhaps the day might come when they would rise up and strike from within.