Jackdaws (51 page)

"Yes, sir."

Dieter entered the basement
corridor. He could hear the rumble of the diesel-fueled generator that supplied
electricity to the phone system. He passed the doors of the equipment rooms and
entered the interview room. He hoped to find the new prisoner here, but the
room was empty.

Puzzled, he stepped inside and closed
the door. Then his question was answered. From the inner chamber came a long
scream of utter agony.

Dieter threw open the door.

Becker stood at the electric shock
machine. Weber sat on a chair nearby. A young woman lay on the operating table
with her wrists and ankles strapped and her head clamped in the head restraint.
She wore a blue dress, and wires from the electric shock machine ran between
her feet and up her dress.

Weber said, "Hello, Franck.
Join us, please. Becker here has come up with an innovation. Show him,
Sergeant."

Becker reached beneath the woman's
dress and drew out an ebonite cylinder about fifteen centimeters long and two
or three in diameter. The cylinder was ringed by two metal bands a couple of
centimeters apart. Two wires from the electric shock machine were attached to
the bands.

Dieter was accustomed to torture,
but this hellish caricature of the sexual act filled him with loathing, and he
shuddered with disgust.

"She hasn't said anything yet,
but we've only just started," Weber said. "Give her another shock,
Sergeant."

Becker pushed up the woman's dress
and inserted the cylinder in her vagina. He picked up a roll of electrician's
tape, tore off a strip, and secured the cylinder so that it would not fall out.

Weber said "Turn the voltage up
this time."

Becker returned to the machine.

Then the lights went out.

THERE WAS A blue flash and a bang
from behind the oven. The lights went out, and the kitchen was filled with the
smell of scorched insulation. The motor of the refrigerator ran down with a
groan as the power was cut off. The young cook said in German, "What's
going on?"

Flick ran out of the door and
through the canteen with Jelly and Greta hard on her heels. They followed a short
corridor past the cleaning cupboard. At the top of the stairs Flick paused. She
drew her submachine gun and held it concealed under the flap of her coat.

"The basement will be in total
darkness?" she said.

"I cut all the cables,
including the wires to the emergency lighting system," Greta assured her.

"Let's go."

They ran down the stairs. The
daylight coming from the ground-floor windows faded rapidly as they descended,
and the entrance to the basement was half-dark.

There were two soldiers standing
just inside the door. One of them, a young corporal with a rifle, smiled and
said, "Don't worry, ladies, it's only a power cut."

Flick shot him in the chest, then
swung her weapon and shot the sergeant.

The three Jackdaws stepped through
the doorway. Flick held her gun in her right hand and the flashlight in her
left. She could hear a low rumble of machinery and several voices shouting
questions in German from distant rooms.

She turned on an electric torch for
a second. She was in a broad corridor with a low ceiling. Farther along, doors
were opening. She switched off the flashlight. A moment later she saw the
flicker of a match at the far end. About thirty seconds had passed since Greta
cut off the power. It would not be long before the Germans recovered from the
shock and found flashlights. She had only a minute, maybe less, to get out of
sight.

She tried the nearest door. It was
open. She shone her flashlight inside. This was a photo lab, with prints
hanging to dry and a man in a white coat fumbling his way across the room.

She slammed the door, crossed the
corridor in two strides, and tried a door on the opposite side. It was locked.
She guessed, from the position of the room at the front of the château under a corner
of the parking lot, that the room beyond contained the fuel tanks.

She moved along the corridor and
opened the next door. The rumble of machinery became louder. She shone her
flashlight once more, just for a split second, long enough to see an electricity
generator—the independent power supply to the phone system, she assumed—then
she hissed, "Drag the bodies in here!"

Jelly and Greta pulled the dead
guards across the floor. Flick returned to the basement entrance and slammed
the steel door shut. Now the corridor was in total darkness. As an
afterthought, she shot the three heavy bolts on the inside. That might give her
precious extra seconds.

She returned to the generator room,
closed the door, and turned on her flashlight.

Jelly and Greta had pushed the
bodies behind the door and stood panting with the effort. "All done,"
Greta murmured.

There was a mass of pipes and cables
in the room, but they were all color-coded with German efficiency, and Flick
knew which was which: fresh-air pipes were yellow, fuel lines were brown, water
pipes were green, and power lines were striped red-and-black. She directed her
torch at the brown fuel line to the generator. "Later, if we have time, I
want you to blow a hole in that."

"Easy," said Jelly.

"Now, put your hand on my
shoulder and follow me. Greta, you follow Jelly the same way. Okay?"

"Okay."

Flick turned off her flashlight and
opened the door. Now they had to explore the basement blind. She put her hand
to the wall as a guide and began to walk, heading farther inside. A confused
babble of raised voices revealed that several men were blundering about the
corridor.

An authoritative voice said in
German, "Who closed the main door?"

She heard Greta reply, but in a
man's voice, "It seems to be stuck."

The German cursed. A moment later
there was the scrape of a bolt.

Flick reached another door. She
opened it and shone her flashlight again. It contained two huge wooden coffers
the size and shape of mortuary slabs. Greta whispered, "Battery room. Go
to the next door."

The German man's voice said,
"Was that a flashlight? Bring it over here!"

"Just coming," said Greta
in her Gerhard voice, but the three Jackdaws walked in the opposite direction.

Flick came to the next room, led the
other two inside, and closed the door before shining her flashlight. It was a
long, narrow chamber with racks of equipment along both walls. At the near end
of the room was a cabinet that probably held large sheets of drawings. At the
far end, the beam of her flashlight revealed a small table. Three men sat at it
holding playing cards. They appeared to have remained sitting during the minute
or so since the lights went out. Now they moved.

As they rose to their feet, Flick
leveled her gun. Jelly was just as quick. Flick shot one. Jelly's pistol
cracked and the man beside him fell. The third man dived for cover, but Flick's
flashlight followed him. Both Flick and Jelly fired again, and he fell still.

Flick refused to let herself think
about the dead men as people. There was no time for feelings. She shone her
flashlight around. What she saw gladdened her heart. This was almost certainly
the room she was looking for.

Standing a meter from one long wall
was a pair of floor-to-ceiling racks bristling with thousands of terminals in
tidy rows. From the outside world the telephone cables came through the wall in
neat bundles to the backs of the terminals on the nearer rack. At the farther
end, similar cables led from the backs of the terminals up through the ceiling
to the switchboards above. At the front of the frame, a nightmare tangle of
loose jumper wires connected the terminals of the near rack to those of the far
one. Flick looked at Greta. "Well?"

Greta was examining the equipment by
the light of her own flashlight, a fascinated expression on her face.
"This is the MDF—the main distribution frame," she said. "But
it's a bit different from ours in Britain."

Flick stared at Greta in surprise.
Minutes ago she had said she was too frightened to go on. Now she was unmoved
by the killing of three men.

Along the far wall more racks of
equipment glowed with the light of vacuum tubes. "And on the other
side?" Flick asked.

Greta swung her torch. "Those
are the amplifiers and carrier circuit equipment for the long-distance
lines."

"Good," Flick said
briskly. "Show Jelly where to place the charges."

The three of them went to work.
Greta unwrapped the wax-paper packets of yellow plastic explosive while Flick
cut the fuse cord into lengths. It burned at one centimeter per second.
"I'll make all the fuses three meters long," Flick said. "That
will give us exactly five minutes to get out." Jelly assembled the fire
train: fuse, detonator, and firing cap.

Flick held a flashlight while Greta
molded the charges to the frames at the vulnerable places and Jelly stuck the
firing cap into the soft explosive.

They worked fast. In five minutes
all the equipment was covered with charges like a rash. The fuse cords led to a
common source, where they were loosely twisted together, so that one light
would serve to ignite them all.

Jelly took out a thermite bomb, a
black can about the size and shape of a tin of soup, containing finely powdered
aluminum oxide and iron oxide. It would burn with intense heat and fierce
flames. She took off the lid to reveal two fuses, then placed it on the ground
behind the MDF.

Greta said, "Somewhere in here
are thousands of cards showing how the circuits are connected. We should burn them.
Then it will take the repair crew two weeks, rather than two days, to reconnect
the cables."

Flick opened the cupboard and found
four custom-made card holders containing large diagrams, neatly sorted by
labeled file dividers. "Is this what we're looking for?"

Greta studied a card by the light of
her flashlight. "Yes."

Jelly said, "Scatter them
around the thermite bomb. They'll go up in seconds."

Flick threw the cards on the floor
in loose piles.

Jelly placed an oxygen-generating pack
on the floor at the blind end of the room. "This will make the fire
hotter," she said. "Ordinarily, we could only burn the wooden frames
and the insulation around the cables, but with this, the copper cables should
melt."

Everything was ready.

Flick shone her flashlight around
the room. The outer walls were ancient brick, but the inner walls between the
rooms were light wooden partitions. The explosion would destroy the partition
walls and the fire would spread rapidly to the rest of the basement.

Five minutes had passed since the
lights went out.

Jelly took out a cigarette lighter.

Flick said, "You two, make your
way outside the building. Jelly, on your way, go into the generating room and
blow a hole in the fuel line, where I showed you."

"Got it."

"We meet up at
Antoinette's."

Greta said anxiously, "Where
are you going?"

"To find Ruby."

Jelly warned, "You have five
minutes."

Flick nodded.

Jelly lit the fuse.

WHEN DIETER PASSED from the darkness of the basement into
the half-light of the stairwell, he noticed that the guards had gone from the
entrance. No doubt they were fetching help, but the ill discipline infuriated
him. They should have remained at their post.

Perhaps they had been forcibly removed.
Had they been taken away at gunpoint? Was an attack on the château already
under way?

He ran up the stairs. On the ground
floor, there were no signs of battle. The operators were still working: the
phone system was on a separate circuit from the rest of the building's
electricity, and there was still enough light coming through the windows for
them to see their switchboards. He ran through the canteen, heading for the
rear of the building, where the maintenance workshops were located, but on the
way he looked into the kitchen and found three soldiers in overalls staring at
a fuse box. "There's a power cut in the basement," Dieter said.

"I know," said one of the
men. He had a sergeant's stripes on his shirt. "All these wires have been
cut."

Dieter raised his voice. "Then
get your tools out and reconnect them, you damn fool!" he said.
"Don't stand here scratching your stupid head!"

The sergeant was startled.
"Yes, sir," he said.

A worried-looking young cook said,
"I think it's the electric oven, sir."

"What happened?" Dieter
barked.

"Well, Major, they were
cleaning behind the oven, and there was a bang—"

"Who? Who was cleaning?"

"I don't know, sir."

"A soldier, someone you
recognized?"

"No, sir… just a cleaner."

Dieter did not know what to think.
Clearly the château was under attack. But where were the enemy? He left the
kitchen, went to the stairwell, and ran up toward the offices on the upper
floor.

As he turned at the bend in the
stairs, something caught his eye, and he looked back. A tall woman in a
cleaner's overall was coming up the stairs from the basement, carrying a mop
and a bucket.

He froze, staring at her, his mind
racing. She should not have been there. Only Germans were allowed into the basement.
Of course, anything could have happened in the confusion of a power cut. But
the cook had blamed a cleaner for the power cut. He recalled his brief
conversation with the supervisor of the switchboard girls. None of them was new
to the job—but he had not asked about the Frenchwomen cleaners.

He came back down the stairs and met
her at ground level. "Why were you in the basement?" he asked her in
French.

"I went there to clean, but the
lights are out."

Dieter frowned. She spoke French
with an accent that he could not quite place. He said, "You're not
supposed to go there."