Bright Dart Page 7

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t one of our gallant, American allies. What brings you here?’

  ‘This is Force 272?’

  ‘It is. You’re not joining us, are you?’

  ‘So my movement order says.’

  ‘That is bad luck. My name’s Cowper, what’s yours?’

  ‘Ottaway, Jack Ottaway.’

  Cowper shook his hand limply. ‘Looking for our intrepid Colonel?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been ordered to report to a Colonel Ashby.’

  ‘Yes—well, I’m afraid he’s still not back from the march yet. I can’t think what’s keeping him, I’ve even had time to bathe and change.’ Cowper slid off the table and walked over to the window.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he said abruptly.

  ‘London.’

  ‘What sort of journey did you have?’

  ‘Terrible—at least it was as far as Crewe. The train was packed, people jammed together in the corridors like so many sardines in a tin. I gave up my seat to a woman who had two kids and a small baby. You know what?—it was so crowded she had to put the baby in the luggage rack above her head.’

  ‘War is hell,’ Cowper said mockingly.

  51

  ‘I haven’t always been stationed in London.’

  Cowper turned round and eyed the cluster of medal ribbons on the American’s chest. ‘No, I don’t suppose you have, but then neither have I.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Western Desert and Italy. How about you?’

  Ottaway hesitated and then said, ‘France.’

  A heavy foot kicked the door open and a tall, mud-covered figure entered the hut. Cowper took his hands out of his pockets and, in a deliberately slow manner, stood to attention.

  ‘We’d about given you up for lost, Colonel,’ he said cheerfully, and then sensing that perhaps he had gone too far, he smoothly changed the subject. ‘Oh, by the way, sir, this is Major Jack Ottaway—apparently he’s joining us.’

  Ashby grasped the outstretched hand and shook it firmly. ‘How do you do,’ he said politely. ‘Have you settled in yet? Is your room all right?’

  Ottaway looked embarrassed. ‘I’ve only just arrived so I guess nobody has had time to show me around yet, Colonel.’

  ‘We must put that right. Cowper will show you to the Mess and then, after you’ve unpacked, we must have a chat. See to it, will you, Miles?’

  ‘Of course, Colonel.’ Cowper paused, and as if the thought had just occurred to him and was of little consequence, he added,

  ‘Oh, incidentally, I’m afraid we’ve seen the last of Albach. We took him round to the MI room and the doctor packed him off to hospital. I gather he thinks it may be pneumonia.’ He glanced sideways at Ottaway. ‘If you’re ready, I’ll take you over to the Officers’ Mess.’

  ‘There is just one thing before you leave, Major Ottaway,’ Ashby said quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘I’d like to know why you’re here’

  To get this kind of welcome after a miserable journey lasting more than nine hours in crowded, dirty, slow-moving trains without even a bite to eat, was for Ottaway the final straw.

  ‘I didn’t ask to come to this lousy, God-forsaken hole, Colonel, but you needed an expert on escape and evasion, and that’s why you were landed with me.’ He picked up his bag and walked out of the hut before Ashby had a chance to say anything.

  After a few paces, Cowper fell in step beside him. ‘Now perhaps you know what I meant about it being your bad luck,’ he said conversationally.

  In 1928, at the age of fourteen, James Ramsay Stack had enlisted 52

  as a boy soldier, leaving behind him an ugly back-to-back house in Bootle, a widowed mother, three elder brothers, two of whom had been on the dole for more than a year, one married sister and an unmarried one who was six months pregnant. For some reason which even he found hard to explain, joining the army was not just a means of escaping from a depressing background but rather the fulfilment of a childhood desire. It was a decision which he had never regretted. On that cold January day when he had reported to the depot in Bury, he found himself in the company of three other boys of the same age, two of whom had since died, one of smallpox in India before the war and the other on the beaches of Dunkirk; the third was a prisoner of the Japanese.

  Only Stack remained—a born survivor.

  A short man of stocky build and with sandy hair, he was naturally quiet and withdrawn, and for this reason he was thought to be unfriendly. He had joined the Long Range Desert Group because that form of soldiering appealed to him, but in remaining with Special Forces he had undoubtedly forfeited promotion, a fact which did not worry him one little bit. He had chosen to learn German because, in fighting them, it seemed the logical thing to do, and much to the surprise of his then Commanding Officer, he had shown a remarkable aptitude for mastering the language. He was completely self-contained, a calm, methodical soldier whose fieldcraft and marksmanship would have done credit to any gamekeeper. Although he personally never bothered with such statistics, it was on record that in three years of active service, he had accounted for forty-six men. In so doing, Stack had been awarded the DCM and the MM and had gained a reputation for being a ruthless, unfeeling killer. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He simply did the job he had been trained to do. As he saw it, it was no part of a soldier’s duty to die for his country, rather his duty to ensure that the enemy died for his.

  When Stack had returned to England in April 1944, the War Office seconded him to the Special Operations Executive as a weapon training instructor and while stationed at Kirkcudbright, he’d met and become attached to a local girl. Although they had been parted for less than forty-eight hours, two letters were already on the way to her, and he had just finished composing the third. Careful and thorough in all things, he read it through before sealing it in the envelope on the back of which he had written SWALK. This finished, he then opened the door of the Nissen hut, saw that the rain had eased off and decided that he would drop it into the post box on his way to the ablutions.

  The bath hut was one of the few brick structures on the camp and it contained eighteen showers arranged in two lines back to 53

  back. Stack thought that lack of privacy was one of the few drawbacks to army life and whenever possible he preferred to take a shower when he was fairly certain that no one else would be using them.

  He struggled through the black-out entrance, opened the inner door, groped for the switch and turned on the dimmed lights.

  Somewhere a shower had been left running and he swore under his breath. To waste precious hot water when solid fuel was in such short supply was not only careless but criminal. The noise seemed to be coming from the row of showers on his left and he went to investigate. It was then he noticed the pair of naked feet sticking out of a cubicle at the far end of the hut.

  Remer was unconscious and lay in a corner on his back, his head supported by the dividing walls. The stream of water from the sprinkler above was playing on to his chest and although it ran down his stomach and thighs in tiny rivulets, traces of lathered soap still remained in his groin and in the pubic hair. There was also a slight graze on his chin and his breathing was laboured and heavy.

  Stack turned off the shower and, lifting Remer out into the passageway, he saw that blood was still oozing from a gash on the back of the German’s head. Judging from the nature and size of the wound he thought it likely that the skull had been fractured.

  Remer could have slipped on the greasy duckboard and struck his head against the regulator, but on the evidence available, Stack thought it doubtful. Clearly he needed more than rudimentary first aid and, pausing only to cover the naked body with his towel, Stack left the shower room and ran towards the Medical Centre.

  Within the space of twelve hours, Force 272 had just suffered its second casualty.

  54

  7

  THE SAUCER WAS chipped and the cup, which was o
f a different pattern, had a crack stretching from the lip halfway to the base. Both should have been discarded long ago but in these days of almost universal shortage, crockery was not an easy item to replace.

  Pitts added two saccharin tablets and while he waited for them to slowly dissolve in the tea, he again opened the envelope and withdrew the four enlarged snapshots.

  They had been recovered from the body of a German soldier killed in the battle for Orel in November 1941 and despite having been re-photographed were of very clear definition. Arranged in sequence, they showed seven Russians, including a young woman, drawn up in line facing a German officer who appeared to be reading aloud from the millboard which he held before him. In the second and third exposures, the Russians were standing on a raised plank beneath the crude gallows, passively waiting their turn when the NCO in charge of the execution detail would tie their hands behind them before slipping a noose around their necks. Two other soldiers stood poised ready to whip the plank off the supporting trestles. The final shot was of the seven dead still hanging from the gallows, their feet pointing towards the ground like ballet dancers. The girl was in the centre and a placard had been pinned on to her blouse which read Wir sind Partisan.

  According to the information typed on the reverse, the executions had been carried out on the orders of a Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Heinrich Gerhardt, the then commanding officer of the 385th Panzer Battalion.

  Superficially, there appeared to be a case against Gerhardt.

  There was no denying the fact that seven Russians had been hanged, and the Division at least had been identified by the formation signs displayed on the tunic worn by the officer in charge of the execution. There was, however, no positive evidence to show that the men concerned were drawn from the 385th Panzer Battalion or that the soldiers were acting on Gerhardt’s orders. In any case, if the Russians were truly partisans, they were not protected by the Geneva Convention and the Articles of War did provide for the execution of captured guerillas. The Soviet Embassy had provided Pitts with some damaging material but 55

  their response to his request had been so swift, that even he felt it was suspect. He was anxious that his colleagues should not catch sight of the photographs while they were lying on the desk and he carefully put them away in the envelope before he touched his cup of tea.

  Making use of the material posed a number of problems for Pitts. He could scarcely show them to the Minister without disclosing the source, which he was deternined to avoid doing at all costs. In approaching his Soviet friends, he had already risked a breach of security, and there was a limit to how far he was prepared to go on Dryland’s behalf. The last thing he wanted was a diplomatic row blowing up in his face.

  Dryland was a young man with political ambitions, and if he wanted to make a name for himself with the Foreign Office, that was all right with Pitts as long as he himself was kept out of it.

  The war had embraced Dryland just as he was about to enter the Diplomatic Service, and now that the conflict was drawing to a close, it was natural that, with an eye to the future, he should want to ingratiate himself with the Carlton House lot. Giving the photographs to Tony was one way of getting rid of them, but the matter would have to be handled carefully and they would need to agree on how best they could be used. At the very least, they provided the bait which would lure Dryland round to his flat again, and once that pleasurable thought had occurred to him, Pitts made up his mind. He dialled Whitehall 9400 and asked for Dryland’s office extension.

  For a change, it wasn’t raining but the sun looked watery and the small valley was in shadow. Nine Slim Jim figure targets had been arranged in groups of three against a dilapidated stone wall, and at fifty yards in the prevailing light, it was difficult to make out the detail on the playing cards which had been pasted on to the centre of each one. They were getting used to the feel of the Walther P38 9mm automatic but at that range most of the rounds were just clipping the edge of the target or falling short. No one in Force 272, apart from Ashby and Gerhardt, knew the precise nature of their intended enterprise but Stack could tell that, simply by handling the captured German weapons, the team as a whole had suddenly become imbued with a sense of purpose.

  You could see it in the way they eagerly inspected the targets after each detail had fired and compared their scores.

  To everyone’s surprise, Ashby was an outstanding marksman with the pistol. Style had a lot to do with it for, whereas they stood sideways on to the target like nineteenth-century duellists, he faced it squarely and kept the automatic in line with the centre 56

  of his body. They also dwelt too long in the aim and, as a result, the Walther began to waver in the outstretched arm.

  Ashby, Ottaway and Cowper formed the last detail and as they came up to the firing point, Stack handed each man a magazine containing six rounds and then withdrew some distance to the rear to join the remainder of the party who were kneeling on groundsheets in a half-circle. He stood there watching them as they stripped and cleaned the Walthers and suddenly his eyes were drawn to Scholl’s right hand, the knuckles of which were swollen and skinned.

  ‘Been in a fight?’ he said casually.

  Scholl looked up and he was clearly worried. He opened his mouth but the crash of gunfire drowned his muttered reply. Stack wasn’t calling for an explanation and really there was no need to because he could make a pretty good guess at what had happened.

  Most women and some men would find those long eyelashes and his open, almost feminine face attractive and he was prepared to bet that Remer had tried it on with the boy. Remer’s mistake had cost him a fractured skull and, in Stack’s view, it was no more than he deserved.

  He winked at Scholl and said, ‘You want to save your strength until we get into a real fight, lad.’

  Ashby fired two rounds into each target, cleared the automatic and then waited for the others to finish. He had seen the strike of each shot and he knew that they had hit dead centre, which was more than could be said for Cowper. His last bullet, missing the target altogether, clipped the stone wall and ricocheted off at an oblique angle.

  Ottaway said, ‘If nothing else, Miles, I guess you would have scared the hell out of them.’

  Cowper scowled, made the Walther safe and then turned to face the American. ‘Only a fool would play around with a pistol at this range if it came to a real thing.’

  Ottaway pointed to the row of Schmeissers laid out on the groundsheet behind the firing point. ‘Do you fancy your luck with a sub-machine-gun then?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Bet you five you don’t beat the Colonel.’

  ‘Dollars or pounds?’

  ‘Pounds, of course.’

  ‘You know what we say about you Americans?’

  Ottaway grinned. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we’re oversexed, overfed, overpaid and over here.’

  ‘You said it, old boy, not me.’ Cowper turned away and walked off the firing point.

  57

  ‘Now that,’ Ottaway muttered, ‘is what I call a real friendly ally.’ He saw that Ashby had overhead and grinned sheepishly.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Colonel,’ he said, ‘but he has a knack of rubbing me up the wrong way.’

  ‘He’s the same with most people.’ Ashby started to move down the range and then, calling back he said, ‘Do you mind giving me a hand with these targets?’

  For a moment, Ottaway was under the impression that the request was addressed to Cowper until he saw that Ashby was looking at him. ‘It’ll be a pleasure, Colonel, he said.

  Quilter saw that Cowper was moving in his direction and wished there was some way to avoid him. He disliked being patronised by the younger man in whose presence he felt totally inadequate.

  It was an irrational feeling which was partly engendered by the knowledge that Cowper had been decorated and was therefore a rather special person. There was nothing glamorous about being an electronic engineer, but without Quilter’s ingenious wireless sets, the SOE a
gents in the field would be helpless. He seemed a puny man but his appearance was deceptive, for within that wiry frame lay great reserves of strength, as those who had climbed with him on Snowdon, in the Cairngorms, the Alps and the Dolomites before the war would be the first to testify.

  Cowper said, ‘This is bloody silly.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Playing around with these toys. Someone should tell the gallant Colonel that, to survive in occupied territory, an agent depends on his wits and his cover story and no one in his right mind would carry a gun.’

  ‘You never told me that you’d had practical experience at this sort of thing,’ Quilter said mildly. ‘Like me, I thought you’d only been on a course.’

  ‘I played around behind their lines in the desert,’ Cowper said defensively.

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  ‘If you’re out to gather intelligence, you look, duck and vanish.

  You don’t go around bumping off people if you can help it.’

  ‘Who said we’re to be employed on intelligence work?’

  Cowper lit a cigarette. ‘Good God,’ he said quietly, ‘it can’t be anything else. Look around you, this lot couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag.’

  The narrow stream entered the valley at a point some three hundred yards beyond the stone wall and then followed a meandering course. On either bank, spindly trees and clumps of bushes grew in sharp relief to the bare hills above and seemed 58

  out of context with the landscape. Anyone keeping close to the brook would have a restricted field of view and the targets which Ashby and Ottaway had concealed in the trees and undergrowth were meant to test each man’s speed of reaction. The battle range would be a demanding test of skill especially as most of them had never handled a Schmeisser before.

  Ottaway said, ‘You believe in putting them through the hoop, don’t you, Colonel?’