The Darkest Hour

by Roberta Kagan

Jan and Jozef hesitated.

  “Go now and stay down!” Valčík screamed again. “They don’t know how many of us are here. Maybe, you’ll make it out of here alive; please, lads, do stay alive and tell them how we showed those Nazi pigs what’s what!”

  Jozef quickly pushed the altar to the side and opened the trap door, leading to the crypt.

  “Come Jan. He’s right. The SS don’t know about the crypt. They don’t know our exact number. And if we do make it out of here alive, I promise you here and now, I’ll go on as many operations with you as possible. I’ll volunteer for every single one, to avenge them all.”

  Jan threw a last glance at the balustrade and dived into the cool underbelly of the church. The priest rushed to abandon his cover behind the pew to move the altar back in place.

  Jan listened to the muffled voices coming from the church and still hoped for something, still believed in Jozef’s optimistic declarations about the future feats that lay ahead of them. He couldn’t possibly know that at the same exact moment Karel Čurda, their fellow SOE commando who once got drunk and blurted out his admiration for Hitler on the base, was standing above the dead bodies of his comrades, laid out in front of the church, and was naming them to his new German masters. He took them up on their offer of the amnesty and the money which they had offered as a bonus and didn’t even flinch at the sight of his former SOE comrades, bloodied and broken, being dragged outside with the first rays of the sun. He smoked German cigarettes and shook his head negatively when Karl Frank demanded if that was all.

  “Two more,” he replied through the interpreter. “Gabčík and Kubiš. They must be hiding somewhere in the church.”

  Jan couldn’t know that both Anna and Libena were interrogated in one of the Gestapo cellars while Frank was giving the order to turn the church upside down to find the missing parachutists. Jan couldn’t know that Anna came the day before instead of Libena because Libena went to the doctor, who told her that she was expecting Jozef’s child.

  Jan couldn’t know that in the morning a Soviet tank troop wrote the name “Lidice” along the length of their tank turrets and were fighting their battle, in the name of it. Neither did he know that Reichsführer Himmler was sitting at his desk at that very moment and staring at the angelic smile of the posthumous mask that he had ordered to be taken from Heydrich’s face and wondering what he was going to do now after he had lost his best man, his idol whom he had secretly admired, the man without whom this whole SD would fall apart like a house of cards.

  Jan only knew that he was still alive and had his best friend at his side and that together they did the unthinkable, something that would never be forgotten, something that he had never expected of himself. And that would suffice for the moment.

  About the Author:

  Ellie Midwood is an award-winning, best-selling historical fiction writer. She's a health obsessed yoga enthusiast, a neat freak, an adventurer, Nazi Germany history expert, polyglot, philosopher, a proud Jew and a doggie mama.

  Ellie lives in New York with her fiancé and their Chihuahua named Shark Bait.

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  Readers' Favorite - winner in the Historical fiction category (2016) - "The Girl from Berlin: Standartenführer's Wife" (first place)

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  Readers' Favorite - winner in the Historical fiction category (2016) - "The Austrian" (honorable mention)

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  New Apple - 2016 Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing - "The Austrian" (official selection)

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  Find Ellie Online:

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  http://elliemidwood.com

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  http://www.goodreads.com/EllieMidwood

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  https://www.facebook.com/Ellie-Midwood-651390641631204/

  The Moon Chaser by Alexa Kang

  Synopsis

  The Moon Chaser

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  In one night, Yuan Wen-Ying can take down the Japanese commander who slaughtered masses in Nanking. Can she set the plan in motion if she has to destroy the unrequited love of the only one remaining by her side?

  Chapter 1

  The dead body beside the lamp post caught Wen-Ying’s eyes and she swerved her bike away from it to the other side of the road. The corpse had been lying there for three days. No one had yet come to remove it.

  Not wanting to suffer a closer glimpse, Wen-Ying tucked her chin and looked away. Instinctively, she held her breath until the body was well behind her, even though she was nowhere near enough to catch the sour whiff of decay or contagious disease.

  In Shanghai, dead bodies were not an uncommon sight. Victims of gang fights killed on the streets. Beggars plagued by illnesses passing away in the dark hours of the night. Such were the facts of life in the city where she had grown up. The sight of death didn’t shock anyone. Back when the Chinese ruled this place, street cleaners would haul the corpses away and dispose of them before dawn. When rush hour rolled in, another bustling day would begin. Business as usual, as Findlay, her old boss at the British consulate would say.

  Not so anymore. Since the Japanese invasion in ‘37, this once prosperous city had become a living hell and nothing was ever usual again. And when Pearl Harbor happened in ‘41, even the untouchable International Settlement succumbed. Now, another three years later, buses no longer operated. The trams ran only sporadically and most private automobiles ceased to travel the roads. Streetlights and traffic lights stopped working. Public services of every kind had all but disintegrated.

  Shanghai today was nothing like what it used to be. Here on Avenue Joffre, mannequins in fancy Chanel dresses no longer gazed elegantly from the storefronts. Bulgari jewelry and Rolex watches no longer shone on display in shop windows. In their place was a dark emptiness. An oppressive, suffocating void that sucked the life out from every corner, lane, and alley. Sometimes, Wen-Ying thought it would smother her and leave her dead on the street next.

  She tightened her grip on the handlebars and sped up. For a moment, she almost felt she could escape if only she peddled fast enough. With each rising breath, she quickened her feet.

  “Ay, watch the road!” A coolie shouted at her. Wen-Ying gasped and braked to a stop. Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t see him dragging his rickshaw up the cross street. She almost hit him.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  The coolie threw her a nasty glare. He opened his mouth, ready to hurl a barrage of insults at her. Before he could, he stomped into a pothole filled with gray water, a discarded cigarette package, and floating concrete debris.

  “Motherfucker.” He grimaced as he pulled out his foot. His homemade cotton shoe was soaked.

  What bad luck. The coolie sure had his lintel turned upside-down today. Hopefully, he wouldn’t catch any diseases. Mosquitoes and flies loved the static water in potholes. Who knew what germs were festering in them? The rot-filled potholes, the decomposing corpses, and all the garbage strewn around invited roaches and rats. An epidemic should break out any day now.

  Wen-Ying got off her bike and walked on past a line of customers queuing up around the block to buy yams and roots. Scavenging farmers had dug these up from the deserted grounds in the rural countryside to sell in the city. One could hardly find places to buy rice now. But even if luxury food items like rice, meat, and vegetables were available for sale, only the privileged few could afford to buy any. Like the Japanese, their allies, and collaborators.

  “Please, I beg you, please, help us a little,” said a woman as she clasped her bony hands in prayer to the people standing in line to buy the scarce supply of yams. The baby tied with a mehdai to her back wailed as the woman went from one person to the next. Everyone squirmed away as she approached them in her ragged blouse and dirt-smeared pants. Looking dazed and lost, she walked toward Wen-Ying.

  Startled, Wen-Ying stepped back. The woman’s sunken cheeks and hollowed eyes looked like a skull. The white spots on the woman’s greasy hair frightened her even more. We
re they dandruff or lice?

  Averting her eyes, Wen-Ying veered her bike away. She couldn’t help the woman or the hundreds more like her squatting on the sidewalks, too weak and hungry to move. Many of them were refugees who swarmed the International Settlement when the Japanese first invaded the Chinese-controlled parts of the city seven years ago. Too bad for them, the International Settlement provided no safe haven. In the end, the British and Americans who lived here couldn’t even save themselves. When the Japanese finally blew up Pearl Harbor four years later, they seized the International Settlement controlled by the British and the Americans too. After that, they rounded up all the foreign citizens of the Allied countries in Shanghai and hauled them off to internment camps. They took away Findlay too. That pompous, racist human scum.

  Findlay. How she despised that man. How many times had she heard him demean the Chinese, calling them "sneaky yellow scoundrels," "treacherous snakes," or "slanty-eyed rats." He would say all these things, even in her presence.

  It wasn’t only what he said. Foreigners like him thought they were superior. They came here, poisoned her people with their opium, and imposed treaties and demands to raid China to build their own wealth. All the same while, they set up their fancy clubs, racetracks, and dancehalls where no Chinese were allowed.

  And then they did allow the Chinese into the racetracks. But only when they realized they could rake in more cash from the Chinese addicted to gambling. And only on limited days when they could tolerate the natives’ presence.

  She huffed at the thought. Those foreigners and their haughty attitudes. She loathed them. Even the ones who showed civility to the Chinese. Their kindness always felt like condescension. She didn’t care for their pathetic attempts to make nice. They had no right to claim any part of her country. They should’ve all just gone away.

  The rare hums of a motorcade broke her train of thoughts. Glancing sideways, Wen-Ying saw the line of Japanese military vehicles driving down the street, flaunting their flag with the red circle and stripes symbolizing the rising sun. Pedestrians moved aside and turned their gazes. Any perceived gesture of disrespect toward the Imperial Japanese Army could invite a savage beating, or worse, death.

  Wen-Ying tipped her hat lower as the enemy roared past. She doubted those short squashes riding in the Isuzu Type 94s could see her face from that distance. Even if they could see her, those lowly ranked soldiers wouldn’t know their superiors were keeping their eyes on her. The IJA command suspected she was a member of Tian Di Hui, the Heaven and Earth Society.

  And she was. She’d been part of the secret resistance group since the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo. Her role in Tian Di Hui was the reason why she, Yuan Wen-Ying, daughter of the prominent Yuan family in Shanghai who didn't need to work, took a job as a translator for the British consulate before the war. As she’d told everyone, her reason for working there was to steer business opportunities back to the Chinese. Behind the scenes, she dispatched information on British political and military development to her network. Her English skills and position with the British government made her invaluable to their resistance efforts. Even now, they needed her to transcribe intelligence obtained from secret radio transmissions and liaise with various foreign agents and governments supplying them arms. If those Japanese soldiers knew who she was and captured her, they would torture her until she told them everything she knew.

  The army motorcade disappeared down the street. The hulk of an abandoned double-decker bus now remained the only vehicle on the road. What would Findlay think if he saw this? Was he even alive anymore? At internment camps, the Japanese tortured their prisoners. Being a highly-ranked British government official, the Japanese would have done anything to get information out of him. Findlay was more than fifty years old. Even if by miracle they didn’t lay their hands on him, she couldn’t see how he could stand a chance against the eternal darkness of the cramped and crowded prison cells. How could he survive the stench of human waste never cleaned and the diseases carried by rodents and bugs?

  The thought of Findlay suffering gave her no joy. She’d seen the horrifically mangled bodies of Tian Di Hui members when the Japanese released them back from prison. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

  An elderly man came out of the store, passing the queue without looking at anyone. He hugged his bag of yams to his chest like they were precious treasures. Suddenly, one of the beggars squatting on the pavement bolted up. A scrawny teenage boy. His eyes fierce like a wild animal, the boy rammed into the elderly man, knocked him to the ground, and snatched the bag from his chest. The bag tore and the yams fell out. The boy grabbed what he could, biting into a raw yam in his hand as he broke away. Seeing the remaining yams rolling on the ground, the other beggars closest to the scene rushed to snag them away, leaving the fallen old man crying out in pain. Those who were standing in line yelled at the beggars to stop, but none would come to the old man’s aid for fear of losing their spot in the queue.

  Quickly, Wen-Ying pulled her bike over to the old man. “Are you all right?” she crouched down and asked, all the while keeping one hand on her bike. “Are you hurt?”

  “They stole my yams.” The old man pointed helplessly at the beggars who had gotten away. Tears streamed down his face. “They stole my yams. There’s nothing left. Nothing left. What will I do now? What will my family eat now? I don’t have any money left.”

  Wen-Ying raised her head. No way she could recover the stolen yams anymore. The beggars had scattered. She looked at the line. The yams would likely sell out before everyone could buy. Still, she reached into her pocket and discreetly took out a Mexican silver dollar. “Buy again.” She stuck the dollar into his palm.

  The old man’s tears stopped. He looked at her. “Xiao jie…,” he said, his mouth falling agape.

  “Go buy some more.” She gave him an encouraging smile.

  “Thank you.” The old man’s face finally eased. “Xiao jie, thank you.” He started to get up and Wen-Ying gave his arm a lift.

  Holding the coin tightly in his fist, the old man hobbled to the end of the queue. Wen-Ying didn’t know if she did a good thing or not. The poor man might be standing in line for another hour, only to end up with empty hands.

  She checked her watch and hopped back onto her bike. Whatever would happen to him, she had to leave. It was almost four o’clock. The other Tian Di Hui members were waiting.

  Chapter 2

  Wen-Ying rode her bike along the street into a small alley until she reached a shikumen building hidden away from the main road. At the entrance with a small sign that said, “Office of Dr. Wu Zhan-Peng,” she stopped. After chaining her bike to the metal rack, she slung her canvas bag across her shoulder and entered. Inside, she clutched the strap of her bag and took a quick scan of the room. A faint ray of sunlight flowed through the small window, illuminating the phrase Compassionate Heart, Compassionate Skills written in calligraphy and framed on the wall. The fluorescent tube on the ceiling did little to further brighten the place.

  No patient sat on the bench in the dim waiting area. Wen-Ying let out a subtle breath of relief and loosened her hand.

  The lone nurse at a desk glanced up.

  “How are you?” Wen-Ying gave her a quick smile. “I have an appointment with Dr. Wu,” she said as she flashed the Tian Di Hui hand gesture signifying the word Ming.

  Ming. A common, innocent term with varied meanings: light, clarity, understood, overt. It could even simply be a boy’s name. For Tian Di Hui members, however, Ming stood for the Ming Dynasty. It was a reminder of their battle cry, “Rebel against Qing and revive Ming.” They had resisted for centuries the foreign Manchurian rulers who established the Qing Dynasty.

  But Tian Di Hui wasn’t always a group of insurgents plotting subversive activities. During peacetime, its members had taken it upon themselves to help the weak and aid the poor, and to assume the role of vigilante to carry out justice when needed and deserved.

  Se
eing Wen-Ying’s hand signal, the nurse’s tired eyes became alert. “You may go in.” She pointed to the door to her left.

  Keeping a straight face, Wen-Ying opened the door and entered the room. Ignoring the wooden desk, chair, and exam table, she pushed the bookcase concealing a secret entrance to the narrow corridor leading to the back of the house.

  In one of the hidden rooms at the end of the corridor, Dr. Wu’s wife, Lian jie, was serving everyone bowls of chicken congee. Wen-Ying’s stomach grumbled as the savory smell hit her nose.

  “Wen-Ying? You’ve arrived,” said the man standing at the head of the long table.

  “Fan Da Ge.” Wen-Ying took off her hat. Like everyone else, she called him Da Ge, the honorific for addressing someone who was the eldest brother. For Tian Di Hui, Da Ge was how members addressed their “First Helm”, and no one deserved this honor more than Fan Yong-Hao. Despite his youthful age of thirty-five, he had turned Tian Di Hui into the most fearsome resistance group in Shanghai. He pulled off their biggest coup when he assassinated the Japanese-appointed mayor of the occupied sectors of Shanghai in 1940. He’d shot the traitor with his own hand. Fan had led them on countless plots to bomb enemy buildings and supply depots; blow up trains, railroads, and bridges; plant mines on land and in water. He’d wreaked so much havoc, the Japanese had put a price on his head.

  For Wen-Ying herself, she didn’t mind calling Fan “Da Ge” at all. Now that she had no more family around her, her brothers and sisters in Tian Di Hui were the only family she had left. When she pledged her allegiance to the group, she had sworn to accept Heaven as her father and Earth as her mother, and to give their members her unwavering loyalty. If Fan would risk his life over and over again for their cause, then she would too. As long as there was hope to drive out Japan, she would dive into boiling water and ride through seas if Fan asked.