Attack at Night Read online

  There was no choice, not really. A suicide mission to save many lives was, perhaps, acceptable. But what if it failed? What if the lives of his men were to be squandered for nothing? He knew that this operation would be unlike anything he had undertaken before. In North Africa, in Yugoslavia, there had been places to hide if the going got rough — places where a few men could hold an army at arm’s length if they needed to. But in southern France the enemy were likely to hold all the cards, right from the start. Unless, of course, there were factors of which he was still unaware, secrets which no one had yet seen fit to reveal to him.

  First things first, Masters had said. Very well, then. He rose from his chair.

  ‘Will that be all for now, sir?’ he asked, directing the question at Masters in a polite tone that by no means matched his mood.

  ‘Yes, Douglas. I will call you in the morning,’ Masters said, also getting up. Westerfield rose too, and came forward to take Douglas’s hand.

  ‘I don’t suppose I shall be seeing you again, Douglas,’ he said, and then flashed a quick smile. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound like it probably did sound! What I meant is, I am heading back to the Clyde at once. I have told you all I can. I’d just like to wish you good luck — no matter what your decision may turn out to be.’

  At that moment, Douglas made up his mind what he was going to do, come what may. But he had no intention of telling Masters — not just yet.

  Colette said that she would show him to his quarters. He followed her up another flight of stairs, and she led him to a door that was recessed into an alcove on the left of the landing at the top.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she told him. ‘Open it.’

  He did so, and gasped in amazement. It was as though he had stepped straight into Jacobean times. The dominant feature of the room was a huge four-poster bed, hung with dark blue drapes that were tied back. Firelight glowed on burnished shields that hung over crossed swords on the wall above the fireplace. The only twentieth-century feature, incongruous and out of place, was an electric table lamp that stood on an eighteenth-century dresser.

  ‘Good Lord!’ Douglas exclaimed. ‘Who was the last to sleep here — Bonnie Prince Charlie?’

  Colette chuckled. ‘You might not be far out, at that,’ she said. ‘He was supposed to have landed at Arisaig, so one of my Scottish friends tells me. Anyway, you might as well make the most of it.’

  ‘And where’s your room?’ Douglas asked, grinning a deliberately wicked grin.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ she told him firmly. ‘Now, it’s exactly seven o’clock. You’ve got one hour to sort yourself out, and then I’ll come and collect you.’

  Someone, Douglas thought a few moments later, was being extremely efficient. His best uniform had been laid out on the bed, together with clean shirt and underwear, and his shoes had been polished until they glittered. Also, to his delight, he discovered that a bath had already been drawn in the adjoining bathroom. His rolled-up winter overalls were on top of his back-pack, which stood in a corner of the room.

  Gratefully, he unlaced his boots and peeled off his sweaty battledress. For a few moments he stood naked in the middle of the room, flexing his weary muscles. Then he slid into the bath and luxuriated drowsily for a few minutes before setting to work to soap away the grime that had accumulated during the exercise with the Norwegians. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for them, and for his own men, roughing it in the hut up in the hills, yet in an odd sort of way he would rather have been with them. Conolly, he thought with an inward grin, would probably have produced a whisky bottle from somewhere by now, and it would be doing the rounds.

  Feeling much refreshed, he had just finished changing into his clean clothing when there was a knock on the door. Colette entered at his summons and smiled at him. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘you’re ready. I like punctual people. Very smart, too, if I may say so.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Douglas grinned back. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’ It was one of his bigger understatements. From where he was standing, she was beautiful. She seemed to have a penchant for green, for she now wore a simply-cut emerald evening gown, fastened at the neck with a little galaxy of stones which, from the way they flashed and sparkled in the firelight, were clearly not synthetic. She wore no lipstick, but a mild touch of rouge accentuated the hue of her complexion.

  ‘Um … very nice indeed, actually,’ Douglas said, rather at a loss for words. ‘Well, shall we go and make a dramatic entry into the dining-room?’

  The dining-room, he discovered, was on the ground floor. They descended the stairs with Colette’s hand resting lightly on his arm, paused a moment at the dining-room door, and saw immediately that the only occupant was a mess waiter, standing stiffly by a serving hatch in starched white jacket. He wore a corporal’s chevrons, in gold, on his right arm.

  Colette chuckled. ‘So much for the dramatic entry,’ she said.

  The corporal bade them a polite good evening, showed them to a table and placed a menu in front of each of them. The meal was excellent and, apart from game soup, distinctly un-Scottish; the main course consisted of a brace of small birds which, Douglas found to his surprise, were wood-pigeons, cooked in a deliciously piquant sauce. To finish off there was a custard tart, dusted with nutmeg, followed by fruit and cheese. There was a palatable red wine, too, served from a decanter.

  The corporal came to clear the table, and asked them if they would like their coffee where they were, or in the ante-room. Douglas, feeling like a smoke, decided on the ante-room, which was a small and comfortable lounge next door. They settled down in armchairs by the fire; the corporal brought them their coffee and, to Douglas’s delight, some cognac, and then discreetly made himself scarce, closing the door quietly behind him with the words, ‘Just ring that bell over there, sir, if you want anything.’

  ‘Amazing, this,’ Douglas observed. ‘I haven’t enjoyed a meal as much in years. Can’t help being curious about who was behind that serving hatch. One of the faithful old retainers, do you think?’

  Colette laughed. ‘It’s possible. We hardly ever see any of the mess staff. It’s all part of the policy, I suppose. The less they know about us the better, even though they might suspect a great deal. By the way, I want to thank you.’

  Douglas looked at her in surprise. ‘For what?’ he asked.

  ‘For not asking any questions during the meal,’ she told him. ‘I would have hated you to spoil my enjoyment of it. Now you can ask all you want; I’ll tell you as much as I can, or as I think you ought to know.’

  Douglas offered her a cigarette, which she declined. He lit one himself, then said: ‘For a start, I’d like to know who I’m dealing with. Just who are you, and how do you fit into all this?’

  She smiled at his blunt manner. ‘I already told you, you can call me Colette,’ she said. ‘As for my employers, it should be obvious to you who they are. And I want you to know this, Captain: I know exactly what I’m talking about. I have been in this game a long time — right from the start, in fact — and I have been in Vichy France twice since it was occupied. Does that surprise you?’

  Douglas shook his head. ‘Not in the slightest. And my name is Callum, by the way.’

  She inclined her head briefly. ‘Very well, Callum. Now, my first job is to brief you on what you are likely to encounter in the Vichy zone — assuming you decide to volunteer for this operation, of course. Otherwise, this conversation ends here.’ She looked at him questioningly.

  ‘I’m going,’ he told her. ‘But I think you already know that.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, I didn’t think you were the kind of man to turn down a challenge, no matter how risky.’

  As she began to tell him about conditions in Vichy France, it quickly became apparent to Douglas just how risky this venture was likely to be. Over and over, she stressed the fact that the main threat the SAS team was likely to encounter was the Milice, rather than the occupying German forces. The Milice, she told him, had originated as a s
emi-chivalrous body of gentlemen anxious to restore France’s shattered military honour after the defeat of 1940, but since then it had turned into something much more sinister.

  ‘They are the scum of the jails,’ she said vehemently, ‘the same sort of would-be gangsters as the thugs Mussolini and Hitler built their movements on. They are Frenchmen who live and work in their home towns and villages, using their local knowledge expertly; that is what makes them so dangerous to our agents. Whereas the ordinary police might be friendly or at least neutral, and the Germans are strangers who might be bluffed, the militiamen are sharp, suspicious characters who are wholeheartedly devoted to the fascist cause. The French SS — oh, yes, Callum, don’t look so surprised, there is a French SS division — recruits widely from their ranks.’

  Douglas listened attentively as Colette went on to tell him about the Maquisards, the Resistance fighters, who had already been betrayed by the Milice.

  ‘The main problem in France.’ she explained, ‘is that security among the Resistance is virtually nil. It isn’t in the French nature to be secretive, and people get arrested simply because they can’t keep their mouths shut. That’s why I’m pleased we’ll be going into the Camargue; people tend to keep themselves pretty much to themselves in that corner of France, which increases our chances. Also, the activities of the Milice are kept under constant surveillance by one very clever — and very successful — Resistance circuit in the area.’

  Colette spoke for several more minutes, by which time Douglas had acquired a fair grasp of what he and his men were likely to encounter. When she had finished, she paused for a few moments and looked at him gravely. Then she said, ‘There’s one thing I have to point out. You will not be able to carry out this operation in uniform. So if anything goes badly wrong and you are captured, you will almost certainly be shot.’

  ‘I’ve a strong feeling they’d shoot us anyway,’ Douglas told her. ‘Anyway, you’ll be in the same boat, I expect.’

  ‘Perhaps. But the Germans have more refined ways of dealing with captured agents. The lucky ones are shot; the unlucky ones are interrogated by the Gestapo for weeks, perhaps months, before being sent to a concentration camp.’ A flush of anger crept over her face. ‘Some day, when this war is over, the deaths of many people will have to be avenged. It will not be easy to sort out the innocent from the guilty among our own people. I sometimes wonder who are the most despicable — those who secretly collaborate with the enemy, or those who come out into the open to side with them.’ Douglas looked at her in curiosity. ‘You say “your people,”’ he said. ‘Are you French?’

  She nodded. ‘In part, at least. It is a strange and very sad story. Do you wish to hear it?’

  ‘If you want to tell me, I should like that very much,’ he said quietly.

  ‘My father was a soldier in the last war,’ she told him. ‘He was killed at Verdun in 1915, or so my mother believed. We lived in the north then, near Amiens. I was only a few months old.’

  The statement took Douglas by surprise, for it meant that Colette was older than she looked.

  ‘For a time my mother was inconsolable,’ she went on. ‘Then, in the early months of 1918, she met an English officer, a good man. He married her, and brought us back to England with him. We were happy — until the day my mother discovered that my real father was still alive.’

  ‘Good God!’ Douglas interjected. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ Colette admitted. ‘It wasn’t until years later, after my stepfather died of tuberculosis, that I found out anything about it. All I knew was that during the intervening years a profound change had come over my mother, something neither my stepfather nor I could understand. She never told him, of course.’

  She paused and drew a deep breath, betraying how painful the story was to tell. Nevertheless, she went on with it.

  ‘It seems that my true father was blown up by a shell. They found him on the battlefield, stripped naked by the blast, alive but suffering from severe head injuries. He knew nothing of where he was, or who he was. It was only after he had spent some years recuperating in a succession of hospitals that the authorities managed to piece together his identity, and notify my mother through their various channels.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him?’ Douglas asked gently. Again, the woman nodded.

  ‘Yes, but only once. We travelled to France not long before this war broke out, not knowing what to expect. I, of course, had no recollection of my father, but my mother found a total stranger — a man with no memory of anyone or anything beyond that day in 1915. It was hopeless, right from the start. They parted, having talked politely to each other for a while, and never saw one another again. He is still in France, and quite a wealthy man, in his own way.’

  There was a long pause, and then Douglas asked: ‘And your mother?’

  For a while, he thought that she was not going to answer his question. When her reply finally did come, it was barely audible.

  ‘She was killed in the raid on Coventry in November 1940. So you see, Callum, I have a personal vendetta against Kampfgruppe 100.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Royal Air Force Station Tempsford was an odd sort of place. Douglas knew nothing about it, apart from the fact that it was some kind of jumping-off point for clandestine operations into Occupied Europe.

  On the face of it, Tempsford was hardly an ideal location for work of this kind, for the A1 Great North Road lay on one side of it and the main London-Edinburgh railway line on the other. Yet its very openness may have helped to preserve its secret identity, for few railway passengers can have taken much notice of the collection of decrepit-looking and obviously out of date aircraft they spotted from the windows of their carriages as they passed by. The villagers of nearby Tempsford eventually guessed, inevitably, that something unusual was going on, but there were never any recorded instances of careless talk.

  Evidence that Tempsford’s secret was very well kept lay in the fact that although the Germans knew that the RAF’S special duties aircraft were operating from a base some thirty miles north of London, they only once came near to finding it. That had happened one night in the spring of 1943, when a lone German bomber flew over the airfield and dropped a string of flares across it. The anti-aircraft defences kept silent, not wishing to betray the well-camouflaged objective. The bomber circled for some time but the crew apparently saw nothing and flew away, dropping their bombs on a nearby nursery garden.

  Douglas and his team disembarked from the Albemarle transport aircraft that had brought them from Prestwick in mid-morning. The sky was clear, the sun glittering on a crisp carpet of snow, which, after a mild December, now, lay over Tempsford. They were met by an Army major, muffled in his greatcoat against the keen January wind. Douglas saw at once that the Albemarle had dropped them on the opposite side of the airfield to the main site; as soon as they were clear of the aircraft, the pilot taxied away round the perimeter track in the direction of the distant hangars.

  The major led Douglas, Colette and the others along a footpath that ended at the door of a solid, brick-built barn. Inside it was comfortably furnished with armchairs, a table and a sofa; covering the whole of one wall there was a map of France and the Low Countries. A tea urn stood on the table, with piles of cups nearby.

  ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ the major told them, ‘and help yourselves to some tea. A van will be over a little later on with some hot food, and afterwards we will issue weapons and clothing. There will be a lengthy briefing in the course of the afternoon.’

  ‘About the weapons, sir,’ Douglas said. ‘I specifically requested MP-40s and ammunition. Have they arrived?’

  The major nodded. ‘Yes, Douglas, they have. Some priority was attached to their delivery, in fact. They’ll be brought over from the armoury this afternoon.’

  Douglas felt satisfied. On every operation he and his men had so far undertaken, they had chosen the German MP-40 machine pistol as the optimum weapon, not l
east because the 9-mm ammunition it used could be readily obtained when operating behind enemy lines. It was also simple to break down into its component parts, a useful feature when it came to concealment. Brigadier Masters had tentatively suggested that they take the recently-designed Sten gun along with them, but Douglas had declined; he had fired one and found it to be highly inaccurate, as well as prone to jamming. Stan Brough, in his blunt Yorkshire fashion, had endorsed Douglas’s feelings.

  ‘Bloody Sten? Couldn’t hit a barn door with one if you were sat on the latch,’ had been his comment.

  The major turned to leave. Douglas had noticed a motor cycle outside; that must be his transport. He turned as he was about to open the door.

  ‘Just one thing,’ he said. ‘This is to be your home until you leave tonight, and I must ask you not to set foot outside the door until then. There’s a lavatory through that door at the back, inside a small yard, with washing facilities. I’m afraid it’s a bit primitive, but it’s the best we can do. Sorry for the inconvenience, miss.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Major,’ she smiled. ‘I’ve been in worse places.’ The major looked slightly embarrassed and left, carefully closing the door behind him. They heard his motor cycle start up and chug away.

  ‘Well, this is fun,’ said Conolly, crossing to the solitary window and rubbing some condensation from it with his sleeve. ‘What a dump.’ He peered moodily out over the snow-covered airfield.

  Douglas sat lost in thought while Conolly produced a pack of cards and persuaded some of the others to join him in a game of poker. Colette reclined in an armchair, reading from a slim, leather-bound volume she had brought with her.

  Douglas felt more than the usual sense of unease about the forthcoming operation. So much depended on the woman; what if she were to become separated from them during the drop? Only she knew where the contact was to be made. He didn’t like it at all. He had a strong gut feeling of helplessness, brought on by the knowledge that in this matter — for the time being at least — he was not master of his own destiny.