Jackdaws (28 page)

On crumpled claw

Come limping a poor little lame
jackdaw No longer gay

As on yesterday

His feathers all seemed to be turned
the wrong way

His pinions drooped, he could hardly
stand

His head was as bald as the palm of
your hand His eye so dim

So wasted each limb

That, heedless of grammar, they all
cried: "That's him!"

"Sure enough, they found the
ring in his nest."

Paul nodded, smiling. Flick knew he
would have nodded and smiled in exactly the same way if she had been speaking
Icelandic. He did not care what she said, he just wanted to watch her. She did
not have vast experience, but she could tell when a man was in love, and Paul
was in love with her.

She had got through the day on
autopilot. Last night's kisses had shocked and thrilled her. She told herself
that she did not want to have an illicit affair, she wanted to win back the
love of her faithless husband. But Paul's passion had upended her priorities.
She asked herself angrily why she should stand in line for Michel's affections
when a man such as Paul was ready to throw himself at her feet. She had very
nearly let him into her bed—in fact, she wished he had been less of a
gentleman, for if he had ignored her refusal, and climbed between the sheets,
she might have given in.

At other moments she was ashamed
that she had even kissed him. It was frightfully common: all over England,
girls were forgetting about husbands and boyfriends on the front line and
falling in love with visiting American servicemen. Was she as bad as those
empty-headed shop assistants who went to bed with their Yanks just because they
talked like movie stars?

Worst of all, her feelings for Paul
threatened to distract her from the job. She held in her hands the lives of six
people, plus a crucial element in the invasion plan, and she really did not
need to be thinking about whether his eyes were hazel or green. He was no
matinee idol anyway, with his big chin and his shot-off ear, although there was
a certain charm to his face—"What are you thinking?" he said.

She realized she must have been
staring at him.

"Wondering whether we can pull
this off." she lied.

"We can, with a little
luck."

"I've been lucky so far."

Maude sat herself next to Paul.
"Speaking of luck," she said, batting her eyelashes, "can I have
one of your cigarettes?"

"Help yourself." He pushed
the Lucky Strike pack along the table.

She put a cigarette between her lips
and he lit it. Flick glanced across to the bar and caught an irritated look
from Diana. Maude and Diana had become great friends, and Diana had never been
good at sharing. So why was Maude flirting with Paul? To annoy Diana, perhaps.
It was a good thing Paul was not coming to France,

Flick thought: he could not help
being a disruptive influence in a group of young women.

She looked around the room. Jelly
and Percy were playing a gambling game called Spoof, which involved guessing
how many coins the other player held in a closed fist. Percy was buying round
after round of drinks. This was deliberate. Flick needed to know what the
Jackdaws were like under the influence of booze. If any of them became rowdy,
indiscreet, or aggressive, she would have to take precautions once they were in
the field. She was most worried about Denise, who even now was sitting in a
corner talking animatedly to a man in captain's uniform.

Ruby was drinking steadily, too, but
Flick trusted her. She was a curious mixture: she could barely read or write,
and had been hopeless in classes on map reading and encryption, but
nevertheless she was the brightest and most intuitive of the group. Ruby gave
Greta a hard look now and again, and she may have guessed that Greta was a man,
but to her credit she had said nothing.

Ruby was sitting at the bar with Jim
Cardwell, the firearms instructor, talking to the barmaid but at the same time
discreetly stroking the inside of Jim's thigh with a small brown hand. They
were having a whirlwind romance. They kept disappearing. During the morning
coffee break, the half-hour rest period after lunch, the afternoon tea time, or
at any opportunity, they would sneak off for a few minutes. Jim looked as if he
had jumped out of a plane and had not yet opened his parachute.

His face wore a permanent expression
of bemused delight. Ruby was no beauty, with her hooked nose and turned-up
chin, but she was obviously a sex bomb, and Jim was reeling from the explosion.
Flick almost felt jealous. Not that Jim was her type—all the men she had ever
fallen for were intellectuals, or at least very bright—but she envied Ruby's
lustful happiness.

Greta was leaning on the piano with
some pink cocktail in her hand, talking to three men who looked to be local
residents rather than Finishing School types. It seemed they had got over the
shock of her German accent—no doubt she had told the story of her Liverpudlian
father—and now she held them enthralled with tales about Hamburg nightclubs.
Flick could see they had no suspicions about Greta's gender: they were treating
her like an exotic but attractive woman, buying her drinks and lighting her
cigarettes and laughing in a pleased way when she touched them.

As Flick watched, one of the men sat
at the piano, played some chords, and looked up at Greta expectantly. The bar
went quiet, and Greta launched into "Kitchen Man":

How that boy can open clams

No one else can touch my hams

The audience quickly realized that
every line was a sexual innuendo, and the laughter was uproarious. When Greta
finished, she kissed the pianist on the lips, and he looked thrilled.

Maude left Paul and returned to
Diana at the bar. The captain who had been talking to Denise now came over and
said to Paul, "She told me everything, sir."

Flick nodded, disappointed but not
surprised.

Paul asked him, "What did she
say?"

"That she's going in tomorrow
night to blow up a railway tunnel at Marles, near Reims."

It was the cover story, but Denise
thought it was the truth, and she had revealed it to a stranger. Flick was
furious.

"Thank you," Paul said.

"I'm sorry." The captain
shrugged.

Flick said, "Better to find out
now than later."

"Do you want to tell her, sir,
or shall I deal with it?"

"I'll talk to her first,"
Paul replied. "Just wait outside for her, if you wouldn't mind."

"Yes, sir."

The captain left the pub, and Paul
beckoned Denise.

"He left suddenly," Denise
said. "Rather bad behavior, I thought." She obviously felt slighted.
"He's an explosives instructor."

"No, he's not," Paul said.
"He's a policeman."

"What do you mean?" Denise
was mystified. "He's wearing a captain's uniform and he told me—"

"He told you lies," Paul
said. "His job is to catch people who blab to strangers. And he caught
you."

Denise's jaw dropped; then she
recovered her composure and became indignant. "So it was a trick? You
tried to trap me?"

"I succeeded,
unfortunately," Paul said. "You told him everything."

Realizing she was found out, Denise
tried to make light of it. "What's my punishment? A hundred lines and no playtime?"

Flick wanted to slap her face.
Denise's boasting could have endangered the lives of the whole team.

Paul said coldly, "There's no
punishment, as such."

"Oh. Thank you so much."

"But you're off the team. You
won't be coming with us. You'll be leaving tonight, with the captain."

"I shall feel rather foolish
going back to my old job at Hendon."

Paul shook his head. "He's not
taking you to Hendon."

"Why not?"

"You know too much. You can't
be allowed to walk around free."

Denise began to look worried.
"What are you going to do to me?"

"You'll be posted to some place
where you can't do any damage. I believe it's usually an isolated base in
Scotland, where their main function is to file regimental accounts."

"That's as bad as prison!"

Paul reflected for a moment, then
nodded. "Almost."

"For how long?" Denise
said in dismay.

"Who knows? Until the war is
over, probably."

"You absolute rotter,"
Denise said furiously. "I wish I'd never met you."

"You may leave now," said
Paul. "And be grateful I caught you. Otherwise it might have been the
Gestapo."

Denise stalked out.

Paul said, "I hope that wasn't
unnecessarily cruel."

Flick did not think so. The silly
cow deserved a lot worse. However, she wanted to make a good impression on
Paul, so she said, "No point in crushing her. Some people just aren't
suited to this work. It's not her fault."

Paul smiled. "You're a rotten
liar," he said. "You think I was too easy on her, don't you?"

"I think crucifixion would be
too easy on her," Flick said angrily, but Paul laughed, and his humor
softened her wrath until she had to smile. "I can't pull the wool over
your eyes, can I?"

"I hope not." He became
serious again. "It's fortunate that we had one team member more than we
really needed. We could afford to lose Denise."

"But now we're down to the bare
minimum." Flick stood up wearily. "We'd better get the rest to bed.
This will be their last decent night's sleep for a while."

Paul looked around the room. "I
don't see Diana and Maude."

"They must have stepped out for
a breath of air. I'll find them if you'll round up the rest." Paul nodded
agreement, and Flick went outside.

There was no sign of the two girls.
She paused for a moment to look at the evening light glowing on the calm water
of the estuary. Then she walked around the side of the pub to the parking lot.
A tan-colored army Austin was pulling away, and Flick glimpsed Denise in the
back, crying.

There was no sign of Diana or Maude.
Frowning, puzzled, Flick crossed the tarmac and went to the back of the pub.
She came to a yard with old barrels and stacked crates. Across the yard was a
small outbuilding with a wooden door that stood open. She went in.

At first she could see nothing in
the gloom, but she knew she was not alone, for she could hear breathing.
Instinct told her to remain silent and still. Her eyes adjusted to the dim
light. She was in a tool shed, with neat rows of wrenches and shovels on hooks,
and a big lawn mower in the middle of the floor. Diana and Maude were in a far
corner.

Maude was leaning against the wall
and Diana was kissing her. Flick's jaw dropped. Diana's blouse was undone,
revealing a large, severely practical brassiere. Maude's pink gingham skirt was
rucked up around her waist. As the picture became clearer, she saw that Diana's
hand was thrust down the front of Maude's panties.

Flick stood there for a moment,
frozen with shock. Maude saw her and met her eye. "Have you had a good look?"
she said saucily. "Or do you want to take a photo?"

Diana jumped, snatching her hand
away and stepping back from Maude. She turned around, and a look of horror came
over her face. "Oh, my God," she said. She pulled the front of her
blouse together with one hand and covered her mouth with the other in a gesture
of shame.

Flick stammered: "I-I-I just
came to say we're leaving." Then she turned around and stumbled out.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

WIRELESS OPERATORS WERE not quite
invisible. They lived in a spirit world where their ghostly shapes could be
dimly seen. Peering into the gloom, searching for them, were the men of the
Gestapo's radio detection team, housed in a cavernous, darkened hall in Paris.
Dieter had visited the place. Three hundred round oscilloscope screens
flickered with a greenish light. Radio broadcasts appeared as vertical lines on
the monitors, the position of the line showing the frequency of the
transmission, the height indicating the strength of the signal. The screens
were tended, day and night, by silent, watchful operators, who made him think
of angels observing the sins of humankind.

The operators knew the regular
stations, either German-controlled or foreign-based, and were able to spot a
rogue instantly. As soon as this happened, the operator would pick up a
telephone at his desk and call three tracking stations: two in southern
Germany, at Augsburg and Nuremberg, and one in Brittany, at Brest. He would
give them the frequency of the rogue broadcast. The tracking stations were
equipped with goniometers, apparatus for measuring angles, and each could say
within seconds which direction the broadcast was coming from. They would send
this information back to Paris, where the operator would draw three lines on a
huge wall map. The lines intersected where the suspect radio was located. The
operator then telephoned the Gestapo office nearest to the location. The local
Gestapo had cars waiting in readiness, equipped with their own detection
apparatus.

Dieter was now sitting in such a
car, a long black Citroën parked on the outskirts of Reims. With him were three
Gestapo men experienced in wireless detection. Tonight the help of the Paris
center was not required:

Dieter already knew the frequency
Helicopter would use, and he assumed Helicopter would broadcast from somewhere
in the city (because it was too difficult for a wireless operator to lose
himself in the countryside). The car's receiver was tuned to Helicopter's
frequency. It measured the strength, as well as the direction, of the
broadcast, and Dieter would know he was getting nearer to the transmitter when
the needle rose on the dial.

In addition, the Gestapo man sitting
next to Dieter wore a receiver and an aerial concealed beneath his raincoat. On
his wrist was a meter like a watch that showed the strength of the signal. When
the search narrowed down to a particular street, city block, or building, the
walker would take over.