Secret Army (20 page)

It was half one in the morning. After lacing his boots, Marc grabbed a hunting knife and a packet of boiled sweets.

‘May as well leave ’em,’ Tweed said. ‘Trainees are only allowed the clothes on their backs and the equipment you’re given in the briefing room.’

While the five healthy trainees scrambled around getting dressed, Paul sat up in bed, bleary-eyed, shivering from the wind blasting through the open doorway and glad that he could go back to sleep once the commotion was out of the way.

‘Good luck,’ he told Rosie, as she walked past his bed.

Takada had also been woken by the noise. He stood at the doorway of his little room in his vest and pyjama bottoms. ‘Take plenty warm clothes,’ Takada advised. ‘Two jumpers. Warm gloves. If you have too many, throw them away, but too few and you’ll freeze!’

Luc heeded Takada’s advice and turned back to grab an extra pullover. He looked at Paul with uncharacteristic friendliness. ‘You did good with all that sneaking around earlier,’ he said. But as always with Luc there was a sting in the tail. ‘Little stick-man like you though, it’s probably best that you’re not coming on the exercise.’

Paul shrugged it off. ‘
Try
not to fight with the others,’ he sighed.

Luc was last to reach the door and Tweed bawled him out in the doorway. ‘When I say
move
, you move. You don’t go back to your bed and start putting extra clothes on. Now shift it, double bastard time!’

With the last trainee out of the door, Takada pushed it shut and wandered between the beds towards Paul. As he walked, he picked scattered belongings from where the kids had dressed in a hurry.

‘They won’t be back here,’ Takada said, as he took one of Luc’s plimsolls and flung it towards the suitcase on his bed. ‘We’ll pack everything up first thing tomorrow. McAfferty’s sending a truck up to collect everything and take us back to campus.’

‘I hope the others do OK on the exercise,’ Paul said, as Takada sat down on the next bed. ‘Whatever it involves.’

‘I’ll second that,’ Takada nodded. ‘If our unit shuts down, I’ll be back in an internment camp.’

Hearing that made Paul wonder if he should have confided in Takada earlier in the day, but it was too late now.

‘Glad I’m not doing the exercise in a way though,’ Paul admitted, as he glanced towards the blacked-out window behind him. ‘It must be one of the coldest nights I’ve ever known.’

*

Hut P hummed with nerves. Marc, Luc, PT, Joel and Rosie had been told to sit by their equipment packs near the door at the back of the room. PT peeked inside and was relieved to find things the way he’d left them, with the Frenchmen’s good compass and the chocolate rations he’d stolen from the Norwegians.

Everyone shot to their feet as Air Vice Marshal Walker came in. He clutched a wad of briefing notes while his red face suggested slightly too much to drink.

‘Sit,’ Walker said firmly, as he stopped in front of a blackboard and turned to face the crowd. He continued once the chairs had finished grating across the floor. ‘I want you to listen carefully. I am
only
going to say things once. I will
not
take questions at the end. I couldn’t give a damn if you didn’t hear or if you don’t speak English.

‘You’ve all spent between three and six months at various training campuses within Great Britain. Now each team must prove its worth in a realistic field exercise. You’ve all been directed towards your equipment packs.

‘Each team will be dropped at a separate location in the north of England. The French team will parachute first, followed immediately by the Norwegians. You’ll then fly onwards for approximately fifteen minutes to the second target zone, where we’ll drop the kids, and almost immediately afterwards the Poles. This is your objective.’

Walker pointed towards his assistant, Jamieson, who unfurled a picture of a large gun, mounted on a rotating plinth.

‘This is a twenty-millimetre anti-aircraft gun. These cannons have been fitted on sensitive military and industrial sites throughout Britain to prevent low-level German bombing. We will provide each team with maps, listing three locations where one or more of these guns are installed. Your task is to remove such a gun from its mounting and steal it. Once you have the gun, you must transport it to London’s King’s Cross station and present it at the lost property office alongside platform three.

‘This is as close as we can get to a real-world test of your skills without dropping you behind enemy lines. Nobody apart from the people in this room and a few senior members of the police force knows what you’re doing. You’ll need to enter a secure facility. If you’re spotted, the chances are you’ll be shot at by armed guards if you don’t surrender quickly. You are allowed to tie up or temporarily disable people. You may
not
do anything that is likely to cause permanent injuries.

‘You’ll find additional maps, drawings and photographs in the mission briefings which will be handed out as you leave this room. I strongly suggest that you use your time onboard the aircraft to study these documents. Each of you will also be given a sealed envelope containing a surrender letter. This letter explains your actions and requests that a message be sent to SOE headquarters in Baker Street.

‘If you surrender or get captured, hand over this letter of explanation and we will do our best to rescue you as soon as possible. However, don’t rely on anyone believing that you’re who you say you are and if you’re captured there’s a good chance you’ll be roughed up by people who think they’ve caught a spy.

‘To pass the exercise, each team must deliver the weapon to the lost property desk at King’s Cross station by midnight tomorrow. That gives you forty-five hours from the time of your parachute drop. The mission is a team effort. The whole team will pass, even if only one member makes it to the station with the weapon. And that is all I’m going to say, except to bid you good luck.’

The Wellington droned, a thousand metres above the industrial heart of England. This was the closest any of the trainees had come to a real parachute operation, instead of a ten-minute flight and a drop on to fields, with instructors and trucks awaiting them.

The five kids had been in the air for three hours. They’d seen war rage through the bomber’s rear dome: flames from an air raid, pockets of flak and vapour trails from dog fights in the moonlit sky. The Kids, Birds, Poles and Frogs huddled in four separate packs, bums perched on parachutes and fearing the worst as the condensation in their breath turned to ice on the inside of the fuselage.

Everyone looked for clues in the briefing documents, but there wasn’t much to go on. Each team had a map showing an area of ten miles square and listing three target sites. Their landing zone would be somewhere within this area, but the map gave no indication as to where. There were also photographs of the target buildings and diagrams showing the appearance of a twenty-millimetre anti-aircraft cannon, along with instructions on disassembly.

‘I wonder what the other teams have got on their maps,’ Rosie yelled, though it barely registered over the aircraft noise and only Marc and PT who sat on either side of her heard.

‘If our maps are worse than theirs, you mean?’ Marc said. ‘Less detailed, or harder targets, maybe.’

‘Walker messed up all our equipment,’ Joel noted. ‘So it’s safe to assume that he’s messed with our information too.’

Marc smiled. ‘Walker hates Henderson so much our surrender letters probably tell our captors to shoot us as enemy spies.’

Rosie took a deep breath and opened her mouth into a wide yawn. The bomber was unpressurised and air was thin at this altitude. The previous day had been tough and they were back in action after less than four hours’ sleep.

Sadness hung in the air as the Frogs and Birds lined up to make their jumps. There was a slight chance the groups would meet during the exercise, but they were competing against the clock not each other and they’d most likely never see each other again.

As the last of the Norwegian women stepped over Rosie’s legs to hook up, a hairclip dropped into Rosie’s lap. Rosie reached up to pat the woman on the back and return it, but as she turned it in her hand she saw a tube made from a cigarette paper wedged between the teeth.

Rosie checked that none of the staff was looking her way before unravelling the paper. It was a tiny hand-drawn map, with the ink showing through both sides of the paper. She made an immediate connection between the three marks on the map and the targets she’d been given with her kit. But off to one side was a fourth place, marked DZ for drop zone. At the bottom was a note in tiny handwriting.

Rosie,

Good snowball fight. I’ll get you back next time! One of my girls has been getting friendly with the Wellington pilots. I hope knowing your DZ saves you time!

Lots of love,

Gerhild

‘Hook up,’ Sergeant Parris shouted, as he opened the door of the aircraft for the second drop. ‘Good luck, girls.’

Rosie had only spoken to Gerhild twice and hadn’t known her name until she saw the letter. The kids could easily have wasted an hour trying to find out where they’d landed, especially at night, in the middle of a blackout and with every signpost and street name taken down.

‘What’s it say?’ Luc asked, barging forwards as Parris ordered the first of the Norwegians to jump.

‘Could be a trick,’ Marc noted. ‘We hardly know her. What if Walker gave her the note with a false DZ on it to try and slow us down?’

The Norwegian women had always seemed nice, but Rosie realised it was possible. ‘We’ll have to treat it with suspicion,’ she agreed. ‘But if it’s right, it’s a massive help.’

Luc had a big smile on his face. ‘It’s hilarious if it is right. You and PT robbed their compasses and chocolate and they still helped us.’

Luc had no scruples, but Rosie felt horrible about it.

‘It’s Walker’s fault we had to plunder the Norwegians’ stuff, not ours,’ PT said.

Once the four Norwegians had dropped, Parris pulled up the door and propeller noise increased as the bomber went into a climb. Marc looked along the fuselage at the four Poles sitting up by the cockpit.

‘About ten minutes,’ Parris told the kids, as he broke into a rare smile. ‘You feeling confident?’

The five kids nodded.

‘Wasn’t sure about training you lot,’ Parris said. ‘But you learn fast. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see any of you again, so good luck with the exercise and whatever else life sends your way.’

PT smiled and spoke for the group. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Parris glanced at his watch. ‘Eight and a half minutes,’ he said, reverting to his usual bark. ‘Start kitting up.’

The four Poles would be dropping two minutes after the kids. As Parris walked down the fuselage to warn them, the kids started strapping on helmets and parachutes. Once they were buckled up they followed procedure and checked each other’s kit.

Marc inspected Luc’s harness and everything seemed OK until he checked his line. ‘Your hook!’ he said urgently.

‘Shit!’ Luc gasped, as Marc held it up.

The static line for each parachute hooked to the overhead bar with a G-shaped clip. The gap in the G was filled with a spring-loaded clip that locked into place around the bar, but in Luc’s case the closing bar flopped from side to side.

‘Sir, sir!’ Luc shouted, as he ran down the plane towards the Poles. ‘What can I do?’

Parris took one look at the hook and saw that the spring had somehow popped out of the clasp. Fortunately, the nine previous jumpers had each left a static line and hook behind.

‘Corporal Kent,’ Parris shouted.

Kent was a slender instructor who’d been assigned to the Frenchmen for the past week. Kent sprung up from the jump seat behind the cockpit and hurried towards Parris.

‘Broken hook,’ Parris explained. ‘I’ll try fixing a replacement. You deal with the drop, OK?’

‘Right you are, sir,’ Kent said, but he looked worried as he moved towards the exit door. Kent was experienced, but it was three in the morning, he’d had no more sleep than the trainees and he didn’t appreciate the sudden pressure of having to organise the drop.

Parris knelt in front of Luc, his shoulder propped against a bulkhead as he tried twisting the broken hook out of the metal bracket sealed to the end of the rope. On the ground this was easy, but with the aircraft shaking and his fingers numb from sub-freezing temperatures it was over a minute before the metal hook came free and hit the floor with a clank.

‘Can’t I use one of the emergency parachutes?’ Luc asked.

This had occurred to Parris, but the parachutes used by the pilots and bomber crew had a manual release cord and mastering it wasn’t something you wanted to teach quickly when there was a risk of death if it went wrong.

‘This’ll be fine,’ Parris said unconvincingly.

At three minutes to drop time Corporal Kent gave the order for the four kids who were ready to approach the doorway and hook up. Luc looked horrified as the door of the plane came open.

Parris had got the hook off one of the other lines, but as he tried fitting it to Luc’s parachute he realised that the hook was slightly too broad to go through the metal ring on the end of Luc’s line. The design was only slightly different and you’d never have noticed unless you tried joining one to the other.

‘Damn it,’ Parris roared.

The Poles had their equipment on and were lining up behind the kids for the second drop as Parris grabbed another used line with the right kind of hook.

The co-pilot made an announcement over the loudspeaker. ‘Cockpit to drop crew, height is six hundred feet, drop zone will be live in ten seconds. Wind is seven knots north-westerly.’

Parris’ fingers had warmed up and with practice he’d become much quicker at switching the hooks.

But he wasn’t fast enough for Luc. ‘Hurry up!’ he begged.

‘DZ live,’ the co-pilot announced.

‘Rosie, step up,’ Corporal Kent shouted. ‘On my mark … and mark.’