‘Expect I’ll change my socks as well before I set off,’ he said. ‘Do you want them too?’
‘Oh, you’re funny,’ Jae said drily, before rolling into Marc’s lap so that he could give her another kiss.
Then she dug her nails into his wrists and begged him not to leave.
‘I’ve got to,’ Marc said, as he tasted Jae’s salty tear on his tongue. ‘Please don’t make this harder than it is already.’
*
The first time Marc left the orphanage he’d been running, scared out of his wits. This time he was trained, he was in love, he had a mission. He didn’t feel like a boy any more, though trailing through countryside struggling to keep pace with two burly Canadian commandos was a stark reminder that he wasn’t a man yet, either.
It was after curfew so they kept to the woods, navigating by compass and moonlight. Four kilometres east of the orphanage they met up with a guide from a local resistance cell.
‘Nice evening for hunting,’ the guide said.
Joseph answered with a pre-planned reply. ‘The only thing I’ve caught is a cold.’
The woman was in the early stages of pregnancy, dressed in trousers and rope-soled shoes. For security’s sake, nobody exchanged names, or details of where they’d come from.
Despite the woman’s state, the pace didn’t flag. Marc battled a stitch down his right side, but with a pregnant woman leading the way he was too proud to admit anything beyond a stiff back from labouring on Morel’s farm.
With half of Europe to run and their best men committed to the brutal war with Russia, German security was spread thin. The guide led them through woodland, across open fields and even braved a section of country road. Despite a full moon, they didn’t spot a German patrol, or even hear a passing vehicle.
Their first halt was just before midnight.
‘Welcome,’ a man said, before beckoning the quartet down a short ladder. He wore an English huntsman’s suit, and his accent established him as true French aristocracy.
They stepped down into an air-raid trench, built within sight of a country house that made the Morels’ place look like a tin shack. Marc shook hands with two lads, probably a year either side of his own age. Although nobody gave names or asked unnecessary questions, these were undoubtedly sons of privilege, in hand-tailored sport coats and polished leather riding boots.
Before the war, much of France’s wealthy elite had held more sympathy for Hitler than their own socialist government. But two years of Nazi occupation had shattered a lot of illusions, and Marc drew strength from the fact that he was squatting in a muddy shelter, toe-to-toe with some real-life toffs.
‘You’ve got half an hour to rest,’ the aristocrat said, as he glanced at a fine wristwatch. ‘There’s bread and cheese, plus a little wine while we wait for the show to start.’
Marc thought show was a reference to a parachute drop. But when they eventually moved from the shelter to a hedge overlooking the rear of the huge house, it seemed something more elaborate was about to take place.
Twenty members of the local resistance were spread over the perfectly mown lawn behind the grand house. Old men, younger women and a few peasant boys. Hay bails had been lit at the corners and there was a distant hum of two aircraft.
Marc was impressed by the scale of whatever was about to take place, but knew better than to ask what it was. As the sound of propellers grew, a pair of peasant girls dashed to the far end of the lawn, close to a lake. They waved phosphorous-dipped sticks that burned bright white.
When the two little planes came into view, they swept close to the tree tops, silhouetted against the full moon.
‘Surely that’s too low?’ Noah said anxiously. ‘What are they playing at?’
Marc had done parachute training and realised from their height and approach angle that these planes weren’t about to drop anything.
‘They were coming in to land,’ Marc gasped, as he pointed at the burning hay stacks and the white sticks. ‘They’ve marked out a perfect landing strip.’
‘We didn’t want to spoil the surprise,’ the posh landowner said, as he beamed at the two Canadians. ‘Quite a show, isn’t it?’
The approaching planes were RAF Lysanders. Their pre-war design was outclassed by newer aircraft, but with wings set high above the fuselage and a sturdy undercarriage the tiny Lysanders could take off and land in rugged spaces barely longer than a football pitch.
The first Lysander came down hard, stopping so abruptly that it pitched forward on to its nose. The locals seemed unfazed as they raced up to the plane, hung off the tail fins to set it right and then picked off lumps of soggy turf clinging to the propeller.
The small cabin door opened. Two passengers stepped out, dragging pallets of equipment behind them. A man and a woman who’d run from the house replaced them on board, while two peasants loaded the plane up with a stack of file boxes.
Rather than let the plane turn under its own power, half a dozen resisters lifted the tail and pivoted it so that it faced back along the field. Less than a minute after landing, the Lysander pilot had throttled up. Twenty seconds after that he was back in the air, skimming pear trees at the end of the makeshift landing strip.
‘We’ve got it down to a fine art now,’ the younger of the well-dressed boys told Marc proudly. ‘One of our early landings hit a cow. Made a terrible bloody mess.’
The second plane had circled while the first was on the ground and it landed within seconds of its sister leaving the ground.
Joseph glanced at Marc. ‘How come we don’t get to go home that way?’ he asked, only half joking.
Marc smiled. ‘I think that’s the first-class service. Not for nobodies like us.’
The second plane delivered a single passenger, along with crates of weapons which got dragged out by a swarm of locals. Leather suitcases and a badly injured RAF navigator were put aboard for the return trip. Shortly the plane was aloft, the flaming hay stacks had been doused and local resistance was dispersing into the surrounding fields.
One of the resisters pointed Joseph and Noah out to the Englishman who’d stepped off the second Lysander.
‘Ahoy there!’ the Englishman called, as he approached the hedge. ‘I’ll wager you’re my chaps.’
He was every bit the stiff-upper-lipped RAF man, with fiery red hair, leather flight jacket and a university scarf around his neck. Apparently the RAF didn’t pay the same meticulous attention to detail that the British secret service did when sending men into France undercover. Marc’s first thought was that the fellow urgently needed peasant clothes and some dirt under his neatly trimmed nails.
‘Squadron Leader Davey,’ he announced. ‘Bloody nice show, eh? All the packages off the planes are numbered. Our gear is in one, two, five and six. Let’s scoop it up, then get this show on the road.’
Noah looked pissed off, and decided to set the Englishman straight over who was in charge.
‘We’re not your chaps,’ Noah said, as he placed his vast hand on the Englishman’s shoulder. ‘When we get up in the air, you’re the boss. When your feet are on the ground, you do what Joseph and I tell you. And lose that jacket and scarf. You couldn’t look more English if you draped a Union Jack over your shoulders.’
‘Now you listen here,’ Davey said, but tailed off abruptly when Noah growled like a dog about to bite. ‘Shut your hole, you stuck-up English bastard.’
Clearly the Squadron Leader wasn’t used to burly Canadian soldiers threatening him, but while the Englishman’s shocked expression was a treat, Marc knew the team had to work together. He was still thinking of the best way to intervene when their pregnant guide did the job for him.
‘Stop waving your dicks at each other,’ she said furiously. ‘The Germans might have seen the landings. Let’s grab our gear and get moving.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
There were another ten kilometres of fields and footpaths to walk. Besides Davey the pilot, the Lysanders had delivered guns, ammo, g
renades, spent parachutes, wire cutters and a specially built Junkers 88 engine-starter unit.
Noel took the biggest load and didn’t even strain. Marc ended up with a light-but-bulky pack of commando clothing on his back, and a shoulder-crippling satchel filled with bullets and grenades. Even the pregnant guide carried her share.
A farmer loaded their equipment on to a cart for the last stretch. It went direct to the stables where they’d spend the day, while the guide took Marc, the Canadians and Davey on a detour along a railway line so they could check out their target.
Noah pulled binoculars and crouched at the tree line as the sun rose. It looked like it had been a quiet night for the Luftwaffe, with three-dozen twin-engined JU-88s parked up neatly, wearing engine covers and camouflage nets. Their hulls were painted matt black so they’d be invisible in the night sky.
Davey spoke in a whisper. ‘From what I can see here, there’s only a couple of planes with the mark four radar here.’
Noah and Joseph were more concerned with base security: studying entry and exit gates and the wire perimeter.
‘I thought you’d like to get a sense of the place,’ the guide explained. ‘But there are regular patrols, so we can’t hang around.’
Back at the railway line, their guide wished them luck, and told them to walk for about a kilometre. The men hugged her in turn.
Davey looked surprised. ‘Not staying with us?’
This operation had been set up at short notice, but Davey’s naivety still shocked Marc.
‘She probably doesn’t even know where we’re staying, or where the cart with our equipment went,’ Marc explained, as they walked along an overgrown single track. ‘If she’s arrested by the Gestapo, she can’t name names that she doesn’t know.’
Beyond the Luftwaffe base the single track hadn’t been used in a good while. Sections of rail had even been cut out and sold for scrap.
Their next guide was a chubby lad, no older than ten. His cover for being out in the woods was a snail hunt and as he walked he prevented escapes by flicking down snails climbing the side of his swinging bucket.
The boy’s family greeted them, but took care not to exchange names. It was a tumbledown farm, with rotting fences and half the roof missing from the stables. There was a single skinny dairy cow, sheep roaming free and the land divided into tiny patches growing a bit of everything.
These were poor people. The contrast to the grand lawn where the Lysanders touched down couldn’t have been greater, but it encouraged Marc to think that people from such contrasting backgrounds were willing to risk their lives to kick out the occupiers.
Marc was shattered from a day’s farm work, followed by the night-long trek. He breakfasted on milk, cheese and fresh-baked bread before pulling his boots off, curling up on a bed of straw and falling effortlessly to sleep.
*
It was early afternoon when he woke. The Canadians were snoring, but Davey was awake. He’d been found some more suitably French clothes, and he sat in the sun outside the stable playing a lively card game with the snail-hunting ten-year-old and twin sisters a year or two younger.
After watching for a while through one half-opened eye, Marc stepped over Noah and joined in. As Davey only spoke schoolboy French, Marc found himself in the role of translator. It was hardly best security practice to let a pair of eight-year-olds know there were undercover agents in the stable, but that damage had already been done.
Life on a remote farm wasn’t exciting, so the kids were excited to have a real-life pilot in their house. Marc translated as Davey explained everything from the basic principles of flight, to the synchronisation gear that enables you to have a machine gun mounted behind a propeller without shooting off the blades.
Davey also knew card tricks. Marc knew better ones, but his skills were rusty and the three kids howled with laughter when he kept getting them wrong.
Mucking around was more than a way to pass time. It helped Marc keep his mind off the dangerous mission that was now less than ten hours away, and visions of Jae that were almost powerful enough to make him stand up and run back to her.
The mood got more serious when the Canadians woke and the kids were sent off to do chores. Davey had brought copies of base maps drawn by the local resistance group. Plans have a way of deviating off course, but that didn’t stop the quartet running through every detail several times.
Their hosts had gone all out on the evening meal. There was a large roast chicken, served with potatoes and carrots tossed in garlic butter, red wine, and a peach and raspberry tart with cream fresh from the cow.
The twins hugged everyone and gave Davey a kiss on both cheeks before walking upstairs to bed. The older boy and his father followed the Canadians outside and started sorting through the equipment that had been brought in on the cart.
To minimise risks to the local civilians, Marc, Davey, Joseph and Noah stripped off their civilian clothes and donned British army boots and dark grey commando gear.
Savage reprisals were one of the ways the Germans tried keeping resistance activity under control. Resistance shoots a German Officer: ten people get taken out of prison and hung in the spot where it happened. Resistance catch a man who sabotaged a tank: a tank battalion turns up and demolishes half of the resister’s home village.
According to the new dog-tags and military identification papers that Davey had brought off the Lysander, Marc was now a Paris-born sixteen-year-old who’d joined the Royal Navy as a cabin boy, then been attached to the Royal Marines Commando force because he spoke good French. He didn’t look sixteen, but some sixteen-year-olds don’t look sixteen either.
Joseph and Noah also had new dog-tags and clean identities. Their real identities had been listed by the Germans when they’d been captured after the Dieppe raid, and that would blow their cover story.
They set off after 8 p.m., with the dipping sun warm on the back of Marc’s head. He felt invincible, dressed in black, with a metal helmet, a pistol, a pack filled with ammunition and grenades, plus his trusty throwing knife wedged into his belt.
But doubts set in as he walked. He’d been through a lot over the past two years, but the next few hours looked set to be the most precarious of them all. He kept thinking how it was a full day since he’d last kissed Jae, and imagining a gravestone with the words died aged fourteen…
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
To ensure this was seen as a commando raid, not a resistance operation, the first job of the evening was to jog four kilometres and hide four spent parachutes. Newly dropped agents and commandos were trained to hide their chutes, preferably by burying them or weighing them down and throwing them into deep water.
In reality, few agents had the luxury of enough time to hide their parachutes completely and in this instance the plan was to hide the unfurled parachutes with the express intention that the Germans found them.
The quartet spread out several hundred metres, over an area of farmland which would make a good drop zone for real paratroopers. It also happened to be owned by a resistance-friendly farmer who would discover one of the chutes early tomorrow morning, if Luftwaffe search parties didn’t get there first.
Marc found an irrigation ditch for his chute, kicked some dirt over it and then weighed down the billowing silk with large stones. For extra effect, he abandoned a parachutist’s mini-shovel and a broken British Army compass nearby.
By the time he rejoined the other three, the twilight had burned out and a light drizzle had begun.
Noah was so big he seemed like part of another species, but this oak of a man kept stopping to pull down the back of his trousers and squat in the bushes.
‘Always gets the squirts something rotten,’ Joseph explained. ‘He was the same before Dieppe, and the lads he trained with tell me his parachute jump school days weren’t too pretty either.’
Noah’s nervy bowels reminded Marc that he ought to have been all clammy hands and thumping heartbeats himself. But he’d been in situations lik
e this before and survived, and although this operation would be more intense than his escape from Germany, he’d been alone then. He drew strength from the three comrades walking alongside him.
They were under a kilometre from the airbase, and Noah was doing his business on the other side of a hedge, when they heard a dog bark. They were on open ground, which made it hard to hear which direction the bark came from, but it was definitely something big and vicious, rather than your friendly neighbourhood pooch.
‘Everyone down,’ Joseph whispered.
Marc dropped on to one knee and opened the leather popper of his pistol holster.
‘Patrol,’ Davey whispered, as they heard legs rustling through the grass on the other side of a tall hedge.
Marc wondered where Noah was as the dog barked again. A bored-sounding German told the animal to shut up. Then a different German said, ‘Scheisse,’ which Marc knew meant shit.
Moments later there was torchlight behind the hedge, followed by a shout of, ‘Hands up! This is a secure area!’
Marc knew it was Noah, even before the tips of his huge fingers got silhouetted against the moonlight above the line of the hedge.
‘What are you doing here?’ one of the Germans asked suspiciously. ‘Are you alone?’
Marc heard a squeaking sound. Joseph was screwing a silencer to his pistol and Marc dipped into the pocket of his combat jacket to reach for his own.
As a pilot Davey had done no combat training, so Joseph gave him a hand signal to lie flat before tapping Marc’s chest and pointing left, then right.
As Joseph peered through the hedge from directly behind the two Germans, Marc tried getting a view from a few metres further back. The scene was almost comic, with Noah standing bare-assed with his trousers around his ankles and the two Germans facing him, one with a growling Doberman on a leash and the other with his rifle aimed at Noah’s head.
Marc looked over towards Joseph, but the moonlight was blocked out by the hedge. The next thing he heard was rustling branches, followed by the double pulse of two silenced pistol shots.