Call to Duty (40 page)

“I see.”

And so did Zack. “Sammy was behind us and could have flown right into the frag from our bombs.” His voice was little more than a whisper.

“If he were lagging too far behind, yes, that is a possibility.”

“Oh my God,” Zack moaned. “
K for King
was going like a…” Words failed him and he stood up, knocking his chair over.

“It is only a possibility,” the older man said. “Luck of the game.”

Zack bolted to his feet and hurried from the room. Outside, he fought for breath. With a will he did not know he possessed he forced himself to move, to think of other things. He found a telephone in a nearby Nissen hut and called his squadron. As the maintenance officer had predicted, they were told to wait until
K for King
was fixed and then fly to their new base at Hunsdon. He went in search of Ruffy, thankful for the activity, the need to do anything however trivial. He found Ruffy outside the officers mess talking to Wilhelmina Crafton. Damn, he thought, what the hell is she doing here? She keeps coming back like the plague. He turned to walk away, not wanting to speak to her.

“Zack,” Ruffy called, “please. Over here.” His voice was strained.

He walked over to them. “Well,” he said, putting a front over his feelings, “what brings you here?”

“I’m posted here now,” she said, “and I happened to see Mr. Ruffum…” Security barred her from revealing that she had set up a station at Manston to monitor the Pas de Calais operation. The SOE had discovered that because of a fluke in the frequency wave propagation of the radios their agents in France were using, the best reception was in the vicinity of Manston or Belfast, Ireland. The SOE had never considered the latter location.

“There’s bad news,” Ruffy said. He shook his head and walked away to give them some privacy.

“My grandfather…” she began, “passed away.” She turned her head so he wouldn’t see her pain. “I know that you were fond of him….” She couldn’t say more.

“What happened?” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

She steeled herself to tell him. “A Doodlebug…one of those damn pilotless rockets…. He saw it when the motor cut out and it fell on our village. He turned into a madman and was everywhere…organizing the firefighters, digging people out, making sure all the children were safe. He…he wouldn’t stop until everything that could be done had been done. He finally went home to bed. He died in his sleep.”

“Why did he do all that?” Zack asked. “He was a sick old man.”

Then it came to her. The American didn’t really understand. She had to explain it to him. Now her own hurt and frustration came out and focused on him. “They were his people and he cared for them. He knew their names, their problems, their children. All you saw were people divided by class…a duke surrounded by privilege and comfort while the common people around him struggled to get through each day. He wasn’t wealthy. In fact, he was nearly bankrupt and deep in debt. He did what he could for them and tried to provide them with a livelihood. But the modern world was beyond him and he hated the twentieth century. All he could do was give them a sense of belonging and place.” She paused to let that sink in. “Two values you Americans…” She bit her words off when she saw the stricken look on his face.

“Go ahead, say it,” Zack said. “Two values we wouldn’t understand.” He looked at her and raised his hand, wanting to touch her, not sure how to say he was sorry. “You’re right, I didn’t understand.” He looked away and stared across the
field. “I am sorry.” When he turned, Willi had disappeared into the building. He suddenly felt drained of emotion and purpose. Sammy, now the duke, how many more? he thought. Chantal? A sense of loss engulfed him and he froze, unable to move.

Men react to combat in different ways. Some slowly disintegrate under the pressure and horrors, develop a telltale twitch or weird behavior, and with luck are rescued before they totally break down or are killed. Others, like Zack, go steadily along at a normal pace, seemingly unaffected by it all. They can survive if they can get out before their inner emotional reservoirs are swamped with the shocks and horrors of war. But Zack was not to be that fortunate. He had reached his limits and was engulfed in a tidal wave of emotional despair. He had seen too much death and destruction and could no longer contain it all. For one desperate moment he doubted his own humanity.

Ruffy’s voice touched him. “It’s time to get on with it,” he urged.

Automatically, Zack placed one foot in front of the other and followed his friend. The movement helped. “I don’t know why this should hit me so hard,” he said. “For a moment, I thought I’d lost it. I wasn’t sure if I could make my body or mind work again.”

“You need a good booze-up,” Ruffy told him. “Or a roll in the hay with some popsie. Preferably both.”

The air in the radio hut at Manston was filled with blue smoke as Willi’s superior puffed on his pipe. He heaved his rotund body into a standing position and walked to the door. “There’s not going to be any more transmissions,” he told the three women clustered around the radio. “The Gestapo has us in a bog in northern France. Our networks are being wiped out in areas we can least afford to lose. We need to unstick things. I don’t think I have to tell you that we’re in danger of a complete collapse and what that means to our invasion plans.” He disappeared out the door into the early-morning dark.

Anna Fredericks looked to the radio operator who served as Chantal’s “godmother” and arched an eyebrow. The radio operator only shook her head. The pattern spoke for itself and
the conclusion was inescapable—they had lost another “pianist” to the Gestapo. “I think we need to talk,” Fredericks said to Willi. The two women walked outside. “We cannot be positive what’s happened to her at this time,” Fredericks said. She did not see Willi’s right hand slowly clench and relax, only to ball into a fist again. “But we must continue. I have another team ready for insertion. I want you to handle them from here.”

“More sheep for the slaughter?” Willi asked.

Fredericks gave her a hard look. “Yes, if need be.” She turned and walked away, leaving Willi alone.

Anger and misery tore at Willi as she walked toward the Nissen hut where she was quartered with the rest of the SOE team at Manston. She almost bumped into a shadowy figure crossing her path. It was Andrew Ruffum. “Sorry,” she said.

“You’re up early,” Ruffy ventured. “Or is it late?”

“And you,” Willi said. She needed human company, someone to talk to.

“I needed a breath of fresh air,” Ruffy said. “We had a difficult mission yesterday and Zack took the news of the duke very badly. I’ve been seeing to him. This is one of those times when the bottle helps.”

“I wish it were always that easy,” Willi said.

Ruffy heard the hurt in her voice and sensed she needed company. “Shall we get some breakfast?” He led her into the officers mess.

The empty bottle of Scotch that Ruffy had produced from some mysterious source lay on the floor beside Zack’s bunk. He stumbled over it in his hurry to reach the latrine and fell on his face, retching and heaving until his stomach was empty. Then he passed out. The young batwoman who looked after the officers in that room heard the noise and found him facedown in his own mess. She had seen it before and dragged him back into the bed. Then she went about the business of cleaning up him and the room. When he awoke, a glass of water and four aspirins were on the stand waiting for him. An hour later, he managed to get out of bed and stagger downstairs, looking for food to quell his churning stomach.

Ruffy and Willi were alone in the lounge, sitting and talking quietly in a corner. Ruffy’s voice had a warm and com
forting tone. “Nothing is certain,” he was saying. “We can only keep muddling on, hoping this nightmare will end.” Willi looked up and saw Zack standing in the doorway. Her eyes were bloodshot and tears streaked her face. She stood and, for an instant, was on the verge of saying something. Instead, she clasped her arms in front of her and walked briskly from the room.

“What was that all about?” Zack asked.

“She couldn’t tell me…but her operations have gone terribly wrong…. She’s devastated. The game can be brutal.”

“It’s no game, Ruffy,” Zack muttered.

After lunch, Zack walked briskly around the base, enjoying the bright, cool day and a chance for some exercise. The one good thing about waking up with a hangover, he thought, is that you know you’ll feel better before the day is over. Since he was on the base, he didn’t pay attention to the sentry standing guard near a set of Nissen huts with a canopy of aerials. He turned down a side path that led into a thick clump of trees behind the huts. Another guard emerged out of the bushes and halted him, demanding to see his pass. “Sorry, I don’t have one.” Zack explained how he had made an emergency landing the day before and was waiting for his plane to be repaired. The SOE had trained the guard to be suspicious of anything unusual and he thought it very strange that an individual with an American accent was wearing an RAF uniform. He placed Zack under arrest and called his superior. A few minutes later, Willi emerged on a bicycle from behind the huts and pedaled toward them.

She came to a halt beside the guard and explained that she would take custody of the miscreant. The guard gave Zack a hard look and disappeared back into the bushes. She motioned him to come with her and pushed the bike back down the path, away from the huts. “You were fortunate,” she explained, “that I was just coming off duty. What were you doing in this sector, anyway?”

“Walking. I needed some exercise. That’s all.” He eyed her bike. “If I could get my hands on one of those and a pass, I wouldn’t even be on the base.”

“Then you’d like to see the countryside?”

“Sure. What I’ve seen from the air, it looks gorgeous.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“Please don’t put yourself out.”

Willi stopped and looked at him. “Ruffy told me about your last mission. An outing will do you wonders.”

“And he told me about you. Can you find another bike? A break would do us both some good.”

She gave him a thoughtful look. “Yes it would. I’ll see what I can arrange.” Twenty minutes later, they pedaled through the main gate and into the quiet countryside. “Well,” she said, “what would you like to see?”

“The coastline,” he answered. “I saw a lighthouse when we landed.”

“You like lighthouses?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never met one before.”

She smiled at the thought of meeting a lighthouse. “I can introduce you. You’ll like the keeper, Tory Chester.” She treated him to a delightful laugh. “I’ve done some exploring on my own. Come on, then. It’s farther than it looks.” They set off down a narrow lane, the fragile peace that eluded them back in place.

The scenery delighted Zack and he would stop frequently, pointing out whatever caught his attention. At one point she laughingly called him the “mad geographer” and discovered, much to her amazement, that the gloom and stress that bound her life had eased its shackles. They had stopped on top of a small hump-back bridge that crossed a rail line and watched a train barrel past, the steam and smoke engulfing them for a moment. She pushed off, heading down the bridge but lost her balance and landed with a hard thump on her rear end. The pout on her face told Zack that she wasn’t hurt.

“Right on the old tosh,” he laughed.

“It’s ‘tush,’ you fool,” she said, getting back on the bike.

“I like ‘tosh’ better.”

Willi laughed. “So do I.”

Twenty minutes later, they reached the lighthouse that stood on a small point of land that jutted out into the Strait of Dover. Zack stood silent, transfixed by the view while Willi knocked on the door. The old man who answered could have been straight from the pages of a Somerset Maugham novel: craggy face, bright blue eyes, a wispy gray beard, slightly hunch-shouldered. He wore a thick Aran sweater that had seen better days and smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
“Hello, lass,” he said, obviously pleased to see her. She introduced Zack to Tory Chester and produced two packs of Players cigarettes. He held them for a moment, one in each shaking hand, weighing them. “You shouldn’t waste these on an old geezer like me. Filthy habit, but thank you.” He ripped open a pack, offered his guests one, which they declined, and lit one for himself, inhaling deeply. He was an addicted chain smoker and had suffered greatly due to rationing.

Zack was intrigued by the relationship between Tory and Willi; he had always thought of her as too snobbish to establish a friendship with someone like a lighthouse keeper. But they were clearly good friends. Tory took Zack on a tour of the lighthouse. The living quarters consisted of two rooms: a combination kitchen-living room and one small bedroom. A door off the kitchen opened onto the tower stairs, which they climbed to the top. Tory paused on the landing below the beacon. It was neatly stocked with an old morris chair and a set of shelves loaded with rags, tools, and a radio. Tory let Zack go up the ladder first onto the platform that surrounded the big lens. He waited for a reaction. Silence. Finally, Zack whispered a single word, “Magnificent.” Zack found the word inadequate to describe the seascape stretched out below him. Satisfied that he had not misjudged the young American, Tory climbed through the hatch and joined him.

“It’s a first-order Fresnel lens,” he explained, pointing out the 666 hand-ground glass lenses that focused the light into a powerful beam. The glass parts and brass framework sparkled like crystal in the sunlight, spotlessly clean and free of dust. “It’s about six feet in diameter, weighs over two tons,” he explained, “and with those two electric lamps”—he pointed to the pair of huge one-thousand-watt electric lamps in the center—“it can be seen for twenty miles.”

“When do you turn it on?” Zack asked.

“When this bloody war is over,” Tory growled. There was a deep hurt or bitterness in his voice; Zack couldn’t tell which. “I still clean it every day so it will be ready.” He stared out to sea. “We’ve reached an unspoken agreement with Jerry—we don’t turn our beacons on and he doesn’t turn his on.”