The long watch, p.1
The Long Watch, page 1
The Long Watch
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Next in Series
About the Author
Also by Alan White
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Celia
Chapter One
There’s a specially nasty quality about rain at night when you’re out in it without protection, wet through and miserable. I’d been out in rain at night on the Yorkshire moors near where I was born; a blanket for a tent and hell to pay when you took it home filthy and tried to smuggle it back on Dad’s bed; boots given free by the Salgash (our name for the charity of the Salvation Army) and a paraffin stove pinched when Uncle George Willie retired from Mobile Crane Erectors. Once I boiled a whole chicken on that stove with daffodil bulbs and young nettle leaves – I was Deadwood Dick. But that was voluntary.
This was a ‘necessity of war’; we were crouched beneath a double hedge in the approximate centre of a patch of wet country west of Chartres, on the edge of what the brochures call the Garden of France. Like all good gardens, it stank of compost. We’d been hiding dry inside a farmhouse when the Germans came to spray it, with machine-gun bullets and the sticky oil-and-phosphorus ejected from two-inch flammenwerfers, carriage mounted with a drum on the back and enough incendiary to burn down Leeds Town Hall. Oddly enough the silly sods came at us from the front; we scarpered by the back, me carrying a hole in my leg where a bullet had tried to castrate me.
The shoulder of Tom Cooper’s jumping jacket was alight but he didn’t even stop to put it out until we were well away from the farmhouse. A sliver of wood from a split door frame had stuck in the back of Jonfrey’s hand, and Major Rhodes ricked his ankle jumping from a window ledge only three feet high.
We hobbled across the yard down the side of a wall. Not three hundred yards from the farmhouse was a double hedge, two feet between two lines of quickthorn. I led them straight into twelve inches of dirty water but we couldn’t go out of the other end since a bush grew across the gap. As we turned in the bottleneck, the first Germans came round the corner to the back of the farmhouse.
Cold morning! Germans in felted serge uniforms, with sad and sullen grey faces. Each was pointing a machine carbine in our direction. Four plops as we sank like water-rats. Slime and drained-off-the-meadow cow-piss went up my nostrils. I held down for the duration of a snatched lung-full of air; it seemed only a second before I had to force myself up into the gun sights again, but I was gasping even before my mouth was clear of the water, which tasted vile.
The Germans had spread themselves, backs to us, tempting. What was the use? A whole battalion was where this lot came from, spun out of barracks at one and eleven a yard. The house was burning on its own; white phosphorus mixed with the black smoke of a dynasty of dusty upholstery. Wood and wattle, stone at the base, roof tiles of wood and straw, cow bar one end, bull stall at the other, and the humans between to keep them apart and spoil love’s old sweet song. The fire started rumbling low down, gathering force; suddenly it pierced the roof, made its own funnel, and that was that. And all the time the grey-faced Germans raked the flames with bullets from their carbines. The leader, a sergeant, must have weighed twenty stones and looked all of twenty years old, the five with him spread out; he stood in the centre, carbine at hip, and sprayed like it was St Valentine’s Day, Chicago, 1929. But the serge uniform and the jack boots made this legal.
The fat German called a halt to the firing. The farmyard was bright as day. Someone had tipped them, that much was clear. Not even Germans spray a farmhouse with phosphorus without checking who’s in it. Unless they already know. ‘After this, sod the Maquis,’ I whispered; ‘we’ll go in and out on our own.’ The major nodded, so did Jonfrey and Tom Cooper.
We watched the fire slowly burn, its flames on our faces the only warmth we’d feel for days to come. It was November 1943; that year Chartres was as cold as a tart’s goodbye. The Germans stayed an hour; a warm barracks and a liverwurst breakfast were waiting. We had boots filled with water and cold feet, seven days of ration chocolate, dog biscuits, glucose tablets, morphia to kill pain, and a compass that pointed north to England. We also had tins of soup that carried fuses; one touch with a cigarette end and they’d heat themselves in seven seconds. Fat lot of good they were – we had neither cigarettes, nor matches. The last smoke on the plane just before we baled out seven hours ago was a Black Cat. There was a coupon in the packet, save fifty and send for a cloth cap, five hundred for a mouth organ made in Hong Kong. The coupons stopped in 1939, that’s how old the cigarettes were.
We left England on a Sunday after church parade. The WAAF who gave me my parachute held my hand.
‘When are you coming back, love?’ She thought it was a training flight.
‘That’s secret information.’
‘I’ve got a forty-eight due. I could have it?’
The WAAF sergeant major came waddling past.
‘Walls have ears,’ I said. When I get back!
‘Every time you move your arse,’ I said to Tom Cooper, ‘I get a wave of stinking water right in my face.’ He was at the front, looking out. No sign of Germans. I’d waited an hour after they left. No fire brigade of course, and no neighbours to see what had happened. They’d come the next day to loot.
‘Okay, let’s move,’ I said quickly. The major nodded approval, the next best thing I suppose to taking the decision himself. We crept out of the bottleneck of those two hedges, turned right and stalked the side of the bushes away from the farmhouse, the Germans, the warmth of the flames, and the awful sweet stench.
The farmer, his wife, and two children had been in the farmhouse, hiding us. They hadn’t had time to get out, as we had, when the fire started.
Chapter Two
Jonfrey was one of those rare birds, a tough bastard with a sense of humour. He specialised in movements, could put men and machines anywhere and get them out again with equal facility. And he had a nose, long, thin and pointed that could smell a German at five hundred yards. Drop him blindfold in the middle of the desert and he’d turn around, sniff the air, and set off marching an exact compass bearing to wherever food, drink and girls were to be found. In the next life he’ll come back as a homing pigeon. Cock-bird, of course. ‘When you’ve ridden as many nags as I have,’ he once said to me, ‘and they’ve bucked you off and bolted for home and oats, you’ll learn to find your own way back from anywhere by the shortest route.’ Modesty! Before the war he was the youngest member of the Olympic show jumping team, and no horse could break his iron grip. He spoke German, French, Spanish and Italian; all fluently. ‘You need the lingo at the horse shows if you’re not going to sleep alone,’ he said.
Tom Cooper, a colourless man with matching background, had a hole in his head the size of a golf ball. Once they abandoned him for dead; he lay raving for two days and nights in a ditch then crawled back through our own lines. He could have left the services with a pension but chose to stay as a commando. Top civvie and Army psychiatrists tried to prove him unfit; he confounded their theories by his lack of anger or any apparent thirst for revenge. They should have let him handle a knife; he was sudden death.
Major Robin Rhodes was the coldest-blooded bastard I’d ever met; and this was the first job he’d taken under someone else’s command. They pulled him out of retirement in barracks in Maidstone; he came out angry and being second in command to me didn’t help.
Our job was simple. I had to get into Tremouilleux prison and take chemistry lessons from an old French professor. The job of the other three was to get me in and out again; and then home to England. We dropped by parachute west of Chartres; hoped to be picked up by light plane in seven days’ time. If we weren’t there, the plane wouldn’t wait; it’d be a long walk home. The job was too small for elaborate preparations, hordes of troops who could more properly be used polishing brasses. Conceived in the mind of some boffin in the War Office, it rated no more than an entry on a long list of ‘Things we are doing to try to justify postponing the Second Front’. Good on paper, a neat economical job that shouldn’t cost too many troops, clutter any wavelengths, endanger any security. Someday someone would open a dusty file and muse ‘I wonder whatever happened to OPERATION PRODNOSE.’ Someone else would search a dusty memory and say ‘They never came back’. We had no means of communicating with anyone in England. We’d been given a contact with the Maquis but the blazing farmhouse showed what that was worth. The local Maquis had been infiltrated, our heads were in nooses. Just to add to the difficulties, the professor was suffering from a dicky heart and not even the Germans would risk moving him. He was the world’s foremost authority on picrates, used in those nitrogen short days as fuse material for explosives. The Germans had given him a laboratory attached to the hospital of the prison; what did it matter if he blew the place sky-high?
I had the degree of Bachelor of Science tucked behind my name, and a job in the Analytical Department of Leeds University to go back to when I had finished playing soldiers; but the degree didn’t qualify me to lead the job into Tremouilleux. A h undred thousand men had better science qualifications than mine – but I was the only one who’d served time in Tremouilleux. Once a flic got nasty with me and I hit him too hard. He died. I served six months in Tremouilleux before the bastards accepted on appeal I’d hit him in self-defence.
That was my brief; as usual along the pale corridors of High Command, it sounded simple. So back into Tremouilleux, find the professor, learn the latest results of his researches into picrates, come back home, and tell our research boffins.
It was rumoured the professor was a collaborator; like so many about to die he wanted desperately to stay alive, and was doing so by feeding information to the Germans.
‘Bomb the prison,’ I suggested to the brigadier briefing me. His face had all the warm enthusiasm of old putty. He shook his head.
‘We could use that information,’ he said.
‘Look sir, with respect, we’ve got the world’s finest organic chemists right here in this country. The Germans, the Americans, can’t hold a candle to us. You put ten of ’em in a laboratory in Manchester University, and they’ll find out everything the professor knows faster than you can say polypropyl 1.2.4 benzol lacrimate. Four men to get into Tremouilleux? They sent a whole company of the SAS into Lyons to get out Leclerc, and he was only a minor physicist…!’
‘Who happened to know more about gyrocompasses than any other man in the world and who, incidentally, has probably helped us sink more U-boats than any of our own so-called naval experts.’
It was getting to be a Monday, Wednesday, Friday milk run, bringing scientists out of Europe.
‘Give me a company of SAS, and I’ll gladly do it, sir,’ I said. Again, putty-face shook his head.
‘I haven’t one to spare,’ he said, ‘anyway, the job doesn’t rate a company. It’s a question of priorities, my dear chap. And possibilities. We know the target subject is very ill. If we launch an all-out attack on that prison, most probably he’ll be the first one to die. Our informant is quite specific about that. We have to put someone in there, quietly and very quickly. There isn’t time to train a company, even if we had one. There isn’t time to send out air reconnaissance, there isn’t time…’
‘And you trust me to get in there and hold his hand?’ For once he proved he could smile when absolutely necessary!
‘You’re the biggest risk we take,’ he said. He turned pages covered with angry writing like fly-dung. ‘You haven’t exactly endeared yourself to people in the past, have you?’ He read some of the pages with the look of disdain on his face they practise in mirrors at public schools and military colleges. ‘The catalogue of your misdemeanours makes dreary reading. One or two things do emerge, however, quite clearly. You’re completely undisciplined, can’t get on with people and appear to have no qualities of leadership whatsoever.’
‘I can’t think why you’re sending me, sir.’
‘Dammit,’ he said, ‘nor can I. Except that you appear to be tough as an old saddle, speak French as badly as the French themselves, know the inside of Tremouilleux prison, and somehow managed to stay at a bench long enough to get yourself a qualification of sorts in chemistry. Look here, man,’ he said, choler getting the better of him. ‘I don’t want to send you; I don’t want to have anything to do with you. If I had my way, you probably wouldn’t be in the British Army. It does occur to me, however, that even you might not be insensitive to the fact that, assuming the unlikely happens and you succeed, you’ll probably do more to shorten the war than I, with all the scrambled egg on my hat, will ever achieve. And that,’ he said sourly, ‘after a lifetime of soldiering, is a sickening thought!’
I’d show the bastard. Not a motive to be recommended for setting out to be a hero, but the only one I had. And I’d bring a sample of the picrates back with me and stick ’em right up his doubtless pile-raddled arse!
I met the others, the major, Simon and Jonfrey, in an old coach-house in Paddock Wood that before the war had housed a team of the world’s finest dray-horses; their memory lingered on, a smell I would never forget. Various boffins came and went, leaving behind an impression of wasted time and a library of aerial photographs and hand-drawn maps. Thin-lipped men reluctantly assigned codewords to us, a fat and balding officer from the Royal Army Pay Corps made us sign for wads of escape money as if it were a ration of prized toilet paper. A slim ATS captain brought down a model they’d constructed and we gathered around it while she showed us possible routes in and out. The model, to judge from my memory of Tremouilleux, was amazingly good. When, as I bent over to examine it more closely, my hand touched her waist, she drew away from me with disdain. ‘I thought they gave you chaps bromide in your porridge,’ she said. Rank helps; Jonfrey, a lieutenant, knocked her off before she went back to London; at least I assume he did since I found a pair of army knickers in the tack-room in which he slept, with her name, rank and number written in indelible pencil along the torn waistband.
‘Are you going to call off the job?’ the major asked me, crouched in the hedge by the side of the road a mile from the burned-out farmhouse.
‘Because someone gave us away in the farmhouse?’
‘The Germans didn’t get there by accident!’
‘Now they think we’re dead.’
‘You hope…’
Up the team, play hard chaps… He looked and sounded like the brigadier back in England.
‘It’s a chance we have to take, isn’t it?’
‘If they knew we were at the farmhouse, they’ll know our objective is Tremouilleux. Even though they may think they destroyed some of us in the farmhouse, they won’t leave it at that. They’ll lay a trap on every route between here and the prison. They’ll be waiting for us.’
‘Not scared, are you, Major?’ I asked him.
Cold bastard; others would have protested at the slur. Not him. ‘No more than common sense tells me to be,’ he said. ‘I think they’ll know our target; reason tells me to abandon our objective.’
He could be right. Our only hope, however, lay in the Maquis information system. The men charged with hiding us when we came down, according to rule, would not know our destination; the boys who’d help us get into the prison shouldn’t know when and from where we’d arrive. It was a slender hope.
Outside the prison walls was a green hill; on it, in a walled cemetery, the prison buried its dead. During my term the commandant, a necrophile, paraded the inmates every time a prisoner was buried. In the cemetery a large building forty feet square and forty high had been built as a memorial by the Duc de Quelquechose. During my term it stored grass cutters, planks of wood, ropes for lowering coffins, grave-diggers’ illicit smokes. Aerial photographs had shown it was still there; and what made it important to me was that it overlooked the entire prison.
The hole in my leg was going wrong. We were hobbling down a path leading to a wood, the major and I both limping, Jonfrey’s swollen hand supported in the strap of his frame rucksack. I saw his other hand make a well-known sign and we pressed ourselves into the bushes. He went fifty paces forward. His head turned left and right, sniffing like a bloodhound. Then he waved us on.
‘We’ll halt in the wood,’ I said, ‘patch ourselves a bit.’
Deep among trees, movement everywhere without sound. Don’t be fooled. We could lie in a wood for days, fingers on triggers the whole time. They learned the same tricks. I motioned Tom up the tree under which we flopped. With vigilance he could give us vital seconds’ warning of anyone’s approach.
The major’s ankle first. Nothing could be done except to wind his puttee tighter. ‘Thank God you don’t wear strapped issue gaiters!’ His swollen ankle didn’t feel excessively puffy; he could move all his toes. The puttee was already soaked; I wound it tighter to give extra support. ‘Rest it,’ I said, ‘put your feet up for a day or two and drink plenty of hot tea.’
The bastard never even smiled.
Jonfrey’s hand was ugly. The wooden splinter must have carried a lot of dust since the wound was filthy and had already started to turn green. I took a morphia capsule from my first aid kit, intending to give him a shot.
‘Save that,’ he said, ‘for when we really need it.’
