Jackdaws (34 page)

"If you really feel there's
something wrong, we should get out of here fast," the pilot said
nervously.

Something else was bothering her.
She tried to scratch her head and found her helmet in the way. The thought
evaded her.

What should she do? She could hardly
abort the mission just because the villagers of Chatelle were obeying the
blackout rules for once.

The plane overflew the field and
banked to turn. The pilot said anxiously, "Remember, each time we over fly
increases the risk. Everyone in that village can hear our engines, and one of
them might call the police."

"Exactly!" she said.
"We must have awakened the entire place. Yet no one has switched on a
light!"

"I don't know, country folk can
be very incurious. They like to keep themselves to themselves, as they always
say."

"Nonsense. They're as nosy as
anyone. This is peculiar."

The pilot looked more and more
worried, but he continued circling.

Suddenly it came to her. "The
baker should have lit his oven. You can normally see the glow from the
air."

"Could he be closed
today?"

"What day is it? Saturday. A
baker might close on a Monday or a Tuesday but never on a Saturday. What's
happened? This is like a ghost town!"

"Then let's get out of
here."

It was as if someone had rounded up
the villagers, including the baker, and locked them in a barn—which was
probably what the Gestapo would have done if they were lying in wait for her.

She could not abort the mission. It
was too important. But every instinct told her not to parachute into Chatelle.
"A risk is a risk," she said.

The pilot was losing patience.
"So what do you want to do?"

Suddenly she remembered the
containers of supplies in the passenger cabin. "What's your next
destination?"

"I'm not supposed to tell
you."

"Not usually, no. But now I
really need to know."

"It's a field north of
Chartres."

That meant the Vestryman circuit.
"I know them," Flick said with mounting excitement. This could be the
solution. "You could drop us with the containers. There will be a
reception committee waiting, they can take care of us. We could be in Paris
this afternoon, Reims by tomorrow morning."

He reached for the joystick.
"Is that what you want to do?"

"Is it possible?"

"I can drop you there, no problem.
The tactical decision is yours. You're in command of the mission—that was made
very clear to me."

Flick considered, worrying. Her
suspicions might be unfounded, in which case she would need to get a message to
Michel via Brian's radio, saying that although her landing had been aborted,
she was still on her way. But in case Brian's radio was in Gestapo hands, she
would have to give the minimum of information. However, that was feasible. She
could write a brief radio signal for the pilot to take back to Percy: Brian
would have it in a couple of hours.

She would also have to change the
arrangements for picking up the Jackdaws after the mission. At present, a
Hudson was scheduled to land at Chatelle at two a.m. on Sunday, and if the
Jackdaws were not there, to return the following night at the same time. If
Chatelle had been betrayed to the Gestapo and could no longer be used, she
would have to divert the Hudson to another landing field at Laroque, to the
west of Reims, code-named Champ d'Or. The mission would take an extra day,
because they would have to travel from Chartres to Reims, so the pickup flight
would have to come down at two a.m. on Monday, with a fall-back on Tuesday at
the same hour.

She weighed consequences. Diverting
to Chartres meant the loss of a day. But landing at Chatelle could mean the
entire mission failed and all the Jackdaws ended up in Gestapo torture
chambers. It was no contest. "Go to Chartres," she said to the pilot.

"Roger, wilco."

As the aircraft banked and turned,
Flick went back to the cabin. The Jackdaws all looked expectantly at her.
"There's been a change of plan," she said.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

DIETER LAY BENEATH a hedge and
watched, bewildered, while the British plane circled over the cow pasture.

Why the delay? The pilot had made
two passes over the landing site. The flare path, such as it was, was in place.
Had the reception leader flashed the wrong code? Had the Gestapo men done
something to arouse suspicion? It was maddening. Felicity Clairet was a few
yards away from him. If he fired his pistol at the plane, a lucky shot might
hit her.

Then the plane banked, turned, and
roared away to the south.

Dieter was mortified. Flick Clairet
had evaded him—in front of Walter Goedel, Will Weber, and twenty Gestapo men.

For a moment, he buried his face in
his hands.

What had gone wrong? There could be
a dozen reasons. As the drone of the plane's engines receded, Dieter could hear
shouts of indignation in French. The Resistance seemed as perplexed as he was.
His best guess was that Flick, an experienced team leader, had smelled a rat
and aborted the jump.

Walter Goedel, lying in the dirt
beside him, said, "What are you going to do now?"

Dieter considered briefly. There
were four Resistance people here: Michel the leader, still limping from his
bullet wound; Helicopter, the British radio operator; a Frenchman Dieter did
not recognize, and a young woman. What should he do with them? His strategy of
letting Helicopter run free had been a good one in theory, but it had now led
to two humiliating reverses, and he did not have the nerve to continue it. He
had to get something out of tonight's fiasco. He was going to have to revert to
traditional methods of interrogation and hope to salvage the operation—and his
reputation.

He brought the mouthpiece of the
shortwave radio to his lips. "All units, this is Major Franck," he
said softly. "Action, I repeat, action." Then he got to his feet and
drew his automatic pistol.

The searchlights concealed in the
trees blazed into life. The four terrorists in the middle of the field were
mercilessly lit up, looking suddenly bewildered and vulnerable. Dieter called
out in French, "You are surrounded! Raise your hands!"

Beside him, Goedel drew his Luger.
The four Gestapo men with Dieter aimed their rifles at the legs of the
Resistance people. There was a moment of uncertainty: Would the Resistance open
fire? If they did, they would be mowed down. With luck, they might be only
wounded. But Dieter had not had much luck tonight. And if these four were
killed, he would be left empty-handed.

They hesitated.

Dieter stepped forward, moving into
the light, and the four riflemen moved with him. "Twenty guns are aimed at
you," he shouted. "Do not draw your weapons."

One of them started to run.

Dieter swore. He saw a flash of red
hair in the lights: it was Helicopter, stupid boy, heading across the field
like a charging bull. "Shoot him," Dieter said quietly. All four
riflemen took careful aim and fired. The shots crashed out in the silent
meadow. Helicopter ran another two paces, then fell to the ground.

Dieter looked at the other three,
waiting. Slowly, they raised their hands in the air.

Dieter spoke into the shortwave
radio. "All teams in the pasture, move in and secure the prisoners."
He put away his pistol.

He walked over to where Helicopter
lay. The body was still. The Gestapo riflemen had shot at his legs, but it was
hard to hit a moving target in the dark, and one of them had aimed too high,
putting a bullet through his neck, severing his spinal cord, or his jugular
vein, or both. Dieter knelt beside him and felt for a pulse, but there was
none. "You weren't the cleverest agent I've ever met, but you were a brave
boy," he said quietly. "God rest your soul." He closed the eyes.

He looked over the other three as
they were disarmed and fettered. Michel would resist interrogation well: Dieter
had seen him in action, and he had courage. His weakness was probably vanity.
He was handsome, and a womanizer. The way to torture him would be in front of a
mirror: break his nose, knock out his teeth, scar his cheeks, make him
understand that with every minute that he continued to resist, he was getting
irreversibly uglier.

The other man had the air of a
professional, perhaps a lawyer. A Gestapo man searched him and showed Dieter a
pass that permitted Dr. Claude Bouler to be out after curfew. Dieter assumed it
was a forgery, but when they searched the Resistance cars they found a genuine doctor's
bag, full of instruments and drugs. Under arrest he looked pale but composed:
he, too, would be a difficult subject.

The girl was the most promising. She
was about nineteen, and pretty, with long dark hair and big eyes, but she had a
vacant look. Her papers showed that she was Gilberte Duval. Dieter knew from
his interrogation of Gaston that Gilberte was the lover of Michel and the rival
of Flick. Handled correctly, she might prove easy to turn.

The German vehicles were brought
from the barn at La Maison Grandin. The prisoners went in a truck with the
Gestapo men. Dieter gave orders that they should be kept in separate cells and
prevented from communicating with one another.

He and Goedel were driven back to
Sainte-Cécile in Weber's Mercedes. "What a damned farce," Weber said
scornfully. "A complete waste of time and manpower."

"Not quite," said Dieter.
"We have taken four subversive agents out of circulation—which is, after
all, what the Gestapo is supposed to do—and, even better, three of them are
still alive for interrogation."

Goedel said, "What do you hope
to get from them?"

"The dead man, Helicopter, was
a wireless operator," Dieter explained. "I have a copy of his code
book. Unfortunately, he did not have his set with him. If we can find the set,
we can impersonate Helicopter."

"Surely you can use any radio
transmitter, so long as you know the frequency assigned to him?"

Dieter shook his head. "Every
transmitter sounds different to the experienced ear. And these little suitcase
radios are particularly distinctive. All nonessential circuits are omitted, to
minimize the size, and the result is poor tone quality. If we had one exactly
like his, captured from another agent, it might be similar enough to take the
risk."

"We may have one
somewhere."

"If we do, it will be in
Berlin. It's easier to find Helicopter's."

"How will you do that?"

"The girl will tell me where it
is."

For the rest of the journey, Dieter
brooded over his interrogation strategy. He could torture the girl in front of
the men, but they might resist that. More promising would be to torture the men
in front of the girl. But there might be an easier way.

A plan was forming in his mind when
they passed the public library in the center of Reims. He had noticed the
building before. It was a little jewel, an art deco design in tan stone,
standing in a small garden. "Would you mind stopping the car for a moment,
please, Major Weber?" he said.

Weber muttered an order to his
driver.

"Do you have any tools in the
trunk?"

"I have no idea," said
Weber. "What is this about?"

The driver said, "Of course,
Major, we have the regulation tool kit."

"Is there a good-sized
hammer?"

"Yes." The driver jumped
out.

"This won't take a
moment," Dieter said. He got out of the car.

The driver handed him a long-handled
hammer with a chunky steel head. Dieter walked past a bust of Andrew Carnegie
up to the library. The place was closed and dark, of course. The glass doors
were protected by an elaborate wrought-iron grille. He walked around to the
side of the building and found a basement entrance with a plain wood door
marked
Archives Municipales
.

Dieter swung at the door with the
hammer, hitting the lock. It broke after four blows. He went inside, turning on
the lights. He ran up a narrow staircase to the main floor and crossed the
lobby to the fiction section. There he located the letter F for Flaubert and
picked out a copy of the book he was looking for,
Madame Bovary
. It was not
particularly lucky: that was the one book that must be available in every
library in the country.

He turned to nine and located the
passage he was thinking about. He had remembered it accurately. It would serve
his purpose very well.

He returned to the car. Goedel was
looking amused. Weber said incredulously, "You needed something to
read?"

"Sometimes I find it difficult
to get to sleep," Dieter replied.

Goedel laughed. He took the book
from Dieter and read its title. "A classic of world literature," he
said. "All the same, I imagine that's the first time someone broke down
the library door to borrow it."

They drove on to Sainte-Cécile. By
the time they reached the château, Dieter's plan was fully formed.

He ordered Lieutenant Hesse to
prepare Michel by stripping him naked and tying him to a chair in the torture
chamber. "Show him the instrument used for pulling out fingernails,"
he said. "Leave it on the table in front of him." While that was
being done, he got a pen, a bottle of ink, and a pad of letter paper from the
offices on the upper floor. Walter Goedel ensconced himself in a corner of the
torture chamber to watch. Dieter studied Michel for a few moments. The
Resistance leader was a tall man, with attractive wrinkles around his eyes. He
had a kind of bad-boy look that women liked. Now he was scared but determined.
He was thinking grimly about how to hold out as long as possible against
torture, Dieter guessed.

Dieter put the pen, ink, and paper
on the table next to the fingernail pliers, to show that they were
alternatives. "Untie his hands," he said.