by David Roy
‘Hard to know who’s the enemy’, came a voice. Startled, Sam looked around for his new companion before realising that the voice belonged to the van’s driver, now seemingly imprisoned in the cab. The rear window was smashed and Sam could make out the back of his head.
‘Shit!’, he said, alarmed. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I think so. Just a scratch maybe.’
‘Are you trapped?’
‘Don’t think so’, said the man, matter-of-factly. But Sam wondered why he was still in the cab if he wasn’t trapped.
‘Well….’ He stopped for a moment as another stick of bombs crashed to earth nearby. How long could this go on for? ‘Well, why are you….’
‘I thought I might as well stay here until it was all over. I know I’m upside down and all that but it’s not too bad.’ Sam shrugged at the strange logic the man used.
‘It can’t go on much longer, surely.’
‘You wouldn’t think so’, said the man. ‘There can’t be much of Belfast left standing, by now.’
‘I just wonder if it’s goin’ to get worse. Once the Russians invade, I mean.’
‘Is that what’s happenin’? It had to come sooner or later.’
‘I think it’s stoppin’ now. I’m goin’ home - if I still have one that is. Do you want me to get you out of there?’
‘Nah. I’ll be okay for a minute. You get off’, said the man.
‘Sure?’
‘Sure. Good luck.’
‘Aye. Good luck an’all.’
Sam crawled out and took a good look at the van. The man was as safe there as anywhere, he supposed.
Above, the last few bombers headed for safer skies, still harried by the jets of the Luftwaffe. He rubbed his forehead and then his eyes, trying to remove dust from his skin. The air smelt of burning. Burning rubber, burning oil, burning wood and God alone knew what else. He felt sick and then he felt a terrible fear for the future. He walked the length of the street rounding the corner and coming clear of the high wall against which he had sheltered, only to see the terrible sight of Belfast laid to waste. Fires still raged and he imagined that they would just be allowed to burn themselves out. Sirens and bells rang as ambulances took the wounded across the city to hospitals which could never cope.
It was like looking at the end of the world. It was certainly the end of Belfast, he thought, sadly. It could never recover from this. In the shipyard, cranes had toppled like matchstick models and in the docks, ships lay broken-backed and smoking. The landscape was almost unrecognisable as Sam stumbled on. It was several moments before he realised that he was actually walking away from his house rather than towards it.
His mum and dad would assume that he was safe in Dublin now. They were in for a shock…. But perhaps he was too. Was his house still standing? Where they alive and what about Nancy? He had no option but to carry on.
In twenty minutes he was at the end of his street. The very far end looked as if it had taken a bomb hit but this end was okay. He guessed that Nancy’s street was okay too. The Cregagh area had only taken a few hits by the look of things. A German army truck, an Opel Blitz, idled outside number thirty. Inside was a collection of youngish men in civilian clothes. He recognised a couple of them, one an ex-airman and another man who had been in a different battalion of the same regiment. Their faces registered a mixture of fear and resignation. A Wehrmacht soldier guarded the truck, his rifle slung on his shoulder. Sam saw another soldier leave number thirty-six with a civilian. The man wore an old suit and carried a battered suitcase. He looked utterly wretched and Sam began to feel that way too as he realised what was happening.
He opened the door of his house and walked quickly to the living room. His mum and dad looked up at him from the little sofa. Incongruously, on the other chair drinking a cup of tea from a china cup, sat yet another German soldier. He stood as Sam entered the room.
‘They’ve come for you Sam’, said his dad, flatly. ‘You’re going into the German Army.’
Epilogue
He was a Wehrmacht officer, a captain, about thirty. His skin was tanned, his hair was dark and longish on top. He had a slightly tousled appearance and spoke in a much softer accent than his brother officers. Surprisingly, his jacket hung on the back of the door and his tie was slightly undone. He looked like a man who’d had a long, hard day.
‘You seem to think you have a lot of choices, Mr Beattie. I can assure you that you don’t’, he said waving his hands in a dismissive gesture. He seemed weary of this procedure. ‘But before I tell you what choices you do have, let me remind you that the Russians were never your allies. You went to war to help Poland…. but Russia invaded Poland too, not just the Germans. And they have treated the Poles much worse than the Germans ever did. But let us confine ourselves to practical details.’ He sat back. His words, his actions could have been mistaken for smugness but there was something about this man’s tone that made it seem like something much more straightforward. He wasn’t interested in his job only in getting it done.
‘We know a few things about you, Corporal Beattie’, said the officer. Already he was making him sound like a soldier again. ‘You have done some bad things…. haven’t you?’ Sam tried not to show any fear. They couldn’t know about the factory, could they? And if they did they wouldn’t be inviting him - if that was the right word - to join the Wehrmacht. ‘But we can overlook these, you see. Pretend they didn’t happen, if you just join up. We need soldiers.’
‘Pretend what didn’t happen?’, said Sam.
‘Oh, come on!’, laughed the officer. ‘We know that you killed Thomas Gibbons.’
‘Tucker?’
‘We were told about this. It’s all in your file. Very interesting file, by the way. So, you see some people might view what you had done as murder. And the Germans treat murder very seriously, of course…. but in fact, it seems that you did us all a favour….’
‘A favour?’
‘Gibbons was a resister. He was being very closely watched. He was working in cahoots with someone else in that working party - someone who went on to blow up the factory. No-one knew that that was going to happen at the time but no-one was too sorry to see Gibbons getting put out of the way either. You were watched closely to see if you could help identify the other saboteurs.’
‘And did I?’
‘Not according to this’, he said holding up a manila file. ‘We got no further with our investigation. Which unfortunately resulted in the factory being destroyed. But enough of all that. You just need to know that we have something of a hold over you.’
‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’, said Sam, resignedly. He put his hands to his face and breathed deeply, as if on the cusp of making a decision.
‘No. No, you don’t. You sign this paper’, the captain slid an oft-duplicated form across his desk and indicated a pen in a wooden holder, as he spoke, ‘or you get sent off….’
‘Sent off?’
‘You join the German Army or get sent off - you know what I mean, don’t you!’ The officer raised his voice, exasperatedly. There was no note of menace. Frustration maybe but he was almost imploring Sam to join. ‘Sent off somewhere where you won’t come back from. Understand?’, he said in a forced whisper.
Sam knew that he meant a camp - enough people had gone already. This officer puzzled him, however. Why did he seem to care what happened to him? Why did he speak of ‘the Germans’ and not ‘we’? Why did he sound….
‘You’re not a German’, said Sam, plainly. The officer raised his eyebrows and sighed. He reached behind him for the jacket that hung on the back of the door. He twisted the sleeve round for Sam to see.
‘Non, monsieur’, he said. The French Tricolour emblem was stitched to the shoulder. ‘Now do you sign?’
‘What uniform would I have to wear?’, asked Sam. The captain gave him a look which said ‘please don’t mess around.’
Sam smiled and reached for the pen.
The End….
Thank you for reading this book. If you had time, I would appreciate a review on Amazon but I understand if you don’t.
Also by David Roy and available on Amazon Kindle:
The Lion, The Eagle and The Bear (Island Redoubt 2)
Terminus (Island Redoubt 3)
The Darkest Clouds (Island Redoubt 4)
The Lost Man
The Avenger's Apprentice (Lost Man 2)
The Grey List (Lost Man 3)
Coldest Before the Dawn (Lost Man 4)
The Mind's Eye (Lost Man5)
No Surrender (Lost Man 6)
Black Valentine (Lost Man 7)
The Dark Sun (Lost Man 8)
Before the Flood (Lost Man 9)
Sabre (Lost Man 10)
Hanford
Pitchblende
Operation Blackball
New Dust
U1404
A Runaway's War
The New Man
The Guillemot Club
Racing Orange
Footprints in the Water
Where is Mr Lastic?
Smoke Without Fire
The Bomber
Battledress Heroes
Painter
Shadowbomb
Vapour Trail
Gold Train
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