Return to the Field Read online

  Return to the Field

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Copyright

  Return to the Field

  Alexander Fullerton

  Chapter 1

  The black-painted Lysander loomed over her, blacker still against the moon and bigger-looking than she’d expected, or remembered from her training days. A plane with one cockpit for the pilot and another behind him for his passenger (or passengers; it would hold two easily enough, even three in emergencies) sounded small – and it was, comparatively speaking – but in this moonlight and from ground level it had a high and bulky look. High-winged, with massive-looking struts; big spats on its wheels, and painted bat-black to reduce visibility when on clandestine missions such as tonight’s.

  It was very cold. Grass still sodden, puddles on the tarmac. Smell of petrol. Marilyn put an arm around her shoulders, squeezed her: ‘Have you back with us in two shakes, Rosie.’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Rosie.’ Hands grasping her arms, and suddenly face to face: ‘God, how many times one’s said it—’

  ‘With me, three now. Third time lucky again, huh?’

  Same breathlessness, though. You said that sort of thing but still had the same queasy, tensed-up feeling. While the other thing she felt, in her shapeless old coat and looking up at Marilyn’s tall elegance, was shabby. It was by design, of course, the norm, befitting not only the general state of things where she was going – German-occupied France – but also the character she’d be playing. From the moment of take-off she’d cease to be Rosie Ewing, aged twenty-five, née Rosalie de Bosque – French father deceased, English mother still bitching away in Buckinghamshire – and become Suzanne Tanguy, former student nurse, French to the marrow of her bones. Pulling herself up the fixed aluminium ladder on this side – the machine’s port side – and climbing in… The dampness on her cheek from that hug and kiss had come from Marilyn, for God’s sake. A tear, or tears – first ever, and why this time? She was settling in, locating the safety harness as well as her luggage which they’d already put in – one tatty old suitcase on the shelf and the heavier but equally scruffy one down by her feet. She’d taken the pistol out of that one, transferred it to a pocket in her overcoat; it was a Llama, 9-millimetre, Spanish-made, with a Colt-type action. There were lots of them around in France, even in German hands, and 9-mm ammo was easy to come by. On her two previous missions she hadn’t taken a gun at all, but last summer there’d been an agent code-named ‘Romeo’ with whom she’d gone out to a Lysander rendezvous in the vicinity of Rouen, the Boches had sprung a trap and there’d been a brief firelight in which ‘Romeo’ had been shot dead and she’d been taken prisoner. She’d resolved soon after that she’d be armed on any future deployment. There were pros and cons but on the whole she thought it was better to have the option.

  Another innovation was that she was taking two cyanide capsules instead of only one, and had them in tiny pockets in the hem of the blouse she was wearing. Last time she’d sewn a single pocket into her bra. Marilyn, who’d brought the capsules down with her from London and handed them over half an hour ago in SOE’s ivy-covered transit-house on this airfield, had understood the reasons for these changes, having read the transcripts of Rosie’s de-briefing after her return last time. The de-briefing had been rigorous – had to be, of any agent who’d been in Gestapo hands and could have spilt beans that weren’t for spilling. As she might well have done: another minute, and she’d have told the bastards anything they wanted to know.

  One of the RAF ground-crew had come up the ladder to help her strap herself in, or to ensure she’d done so – which she had.

  ‘All right, Miss?’

  ‘Lovely, thanks.’

  ‘Best of British, then. Take me ’at off to you, I’ll tell you that. We all do.’

  ‘Oh, go on with you. Thanks, anyway.’

  He’d gone down, and seconds later the machine was moving, filling the night and her head with noise as it rolled forward. She saw Marilyn down there, as the plane’s shadow left that group – Marilyn with an arm raised in farewell, the other holding her fancy Wren hat on. The two behind her were the aircraftman who’d driven the Jeep and the WAAF girl who’d come out with them from the Cottage. Reek of high-octane stronger for a moment as the pilot turned across the wind. He’d assured her that although it was still ‘on the breezy side’ he’d do his best to give her a comfortable ride; he reckoned to be on the ground in France in one hour and forty minutes. The distance to their landing-field was 225 miles – ‘as a strong crow might fly’ – but he’d be detouring here and there to avoid ‘flak-points’ – meaning places where you’d be likely to be shot at. They’d be crossing the Channel at about 200 feet, to stay under the enemy’s radar, but climbing to about 2000 to pass over the coast, somewhere to the east of Arromanches. When they were well inland, clear of flak-points and on course for their destination, he’d be coming down to treetop height.

  He’d asked her, ‘Done it before, have you?’

  ‘Not this way.’

  ‘Well. After this experience you’ll never consider any other way.’ They’d all laughed. Laughs came easily, at such times.

  Only a few streamers of cloud up there now, fast-moving from the northwest. The course to the Angers district would be near-enough due south; the wind would help, she supposed. But he’d have taken that into account, obviously, and the answer to her lightning mental arithmetic was that she’d be on the ground by about one-thirty a.m. French time – Central European time, as they called it… The Lysander was slowing, almost stopping. On a very smooth runway now. Slewing round into the wind and the engine opening up again. What was that advice to the newly wedded virgin? Shut your eyes and think of England? Think of Ben, rather. Even though you were having to desert him now. Poor Ben… The machine was shaking and roaring like some creature in a fury, charging into a battering force of wind – with its tail up, already. Very short take-off and landing runs were a large part of the Lizzy’s suitability for this kind of work, of course. Although landing strips had ideally to be 600 yards long and 400 wide, she remembered; she’d searched large areas of French countryside for such fields herself, in days gone by. There, now – off the ground even sooner than she’d expected, powering up with the moon’s brightness somewhere behind her but already banking round while continuing to gain height. Suzanne Tanguy, on her way. Complete with a Mark III radio transceiver, half a million francs, the pistol, two suicide capsules, and a pounding heart… The money in fact wasn’t for her own use, she’d be handing it over in Rennes to a courier from another réseau. Réseau meant network. While also in her pockets were – as well as a few Paris cinema and Métro tickets and some receipted bills – two crumpled, much-read letters, and a month-old clipping from a small-ads page in Le Matin about a job for an assistant in a medical practice in Orange. Also a pack and a half-pack of Caporals, some French matches, and a lighter containing no fuel but with the initials D.M. engraved on it. D.M. for Daniel Miossec, to whom Suzanne Tanguy had allegedly been engaged and who’d been killed in an RAF attack on Bres
t a year ago. The job advertisement had been screwed up as if to throw away: you’d guess she might have applied for it and been turned down. The letters, of more recent dates, would be important as back-up proof of her identity and circumstances and of the job she had been offered. In fact she would have produced them in support of her application for the Ausweis entitling her to be travelling west from Paris. The Ausweis was in an envelope with her other papers, including food and clothing ration cards and a Feuille Semestrelle issued in Paris a couple of months earlier. It was the end of April now – April 1944, to be precise, April 26, a Wednesday – and what had begun to feel like spring seemed in the past few days to have relapsed into something more like winter.

  Christ… Decidedly bouncy. Alternately dropping like something on a hangman’s rope and bucketing up again. The thing was not to think about being sick: and to convince oneself it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been last time, when she’d landed from a motor gunboat in a little cockleshell of a dinghy, in black darkness and tumbling sea on a remote and rocky beach in Brittany. That had been worse, for sure.

  Night air rushing – and damn cold. Moonshine silver on the aircraft’s metal skin. Thinking of Ben again, who’d been the navigator of that motor gunboat. Earlier this evening, on the way down from London to Tangmere, she’d dreamt about him. Partly she supposed out of this feeling that she was running out on him – the fact he didn’t yet know she’d left, still had the bad news coming. But she’d dozed off in the big Humber and dreamt that her dead husband was trying to persuade her she’d been hallucinating, that it was Ben who’d been killed, not him. ‘I’m as fit as a flea, my lovely!’ Johnny with his boyish good looks and chasing anything that wore skirts, and in that ghost-like evocation posturing slightly – well, typically – in his flying kit, the gear he’d been wearing when his Spitfire had plunged in flames into the Channel two and a half years ago. In the dream he’d clearly wanted Ben dead. Ben who was Australian and of whose existence he’d never known, on whom she herself had never set eyes until after Johnny had been killed – but with whom she’d have been spending this next weekend in London, only wouldn’t now because she’d be back in France. While Ben was not only very much alive but should have every chance of remaining so, thanks to having been wounded a few months ago, being consequently in a shore job now – at Portsmouth, where Rosie’s flatmate would be ringing him tomorrow at lunchtime, telling him: ‘Rosie asked me to give you her love and say please try not to worry but she can’t make this weekend.’ It was a form of words they’d agreed on; he’d know it meant she’d gone back into the field.

  * * *

  Hell. Bigger drop than ever. The sea’s surface would be less than two hundred feet below the Lizzy, at this moment.

  Good reason to direct one’s thoughts elsewhere.

  To her farewell briefing this morning, for instance, in the briefing flat in Portman Square. Such send-offs were normally conducted by ‘F’ Section’s chief, Maurice Buckmaster, but he was away sick and a major by the name of Bob Hallowell had presided. Marilyn had come along with her, as she had on previous occasions. Hallowell routinely going over the details of Rosie’s cover as Suzanne Tanguy and then touching on salient points in the rest of her written orders: she’d already committed them to memory, but he’d had a copy in a file resting on his knees. Comfortable armchairs, and coffee and biscuits on the table.

  ‘What strikes me most forcibly, Rosie, is you’re going to be very much on your own, with a hell of a lot to get done in what may be a very short space of time.’

  Narrow brown eyes fixed on hers. Narrow, bony face, thinning hair. In his middle forties, she guessed, and probably not in the best of health. Asking her – in reference to a section he’d just skimmed – ‘Another rather unusual thing – this stuff in Quimper’s a rum business, isn’t it?’

  ‘The informer, you mean.’

  ‘Given to us by our friends in St James’. One would hardly have expected such – generosity. Might they be getting some quid pro quo?’

  By ‘our friends in St James’’ he’d meant SIS, Secret Intelligence Service; who did not, in normal circumstances or in what passed for their right minds, cooperate much with SOE. SIS were gatherers of intelligence; their agents lay low, kept quiet, went to great efforts never to draw attention to themselves; whereas SOE organized weapons drops and sabotage operations, blew up railway lines and factories: in general, tended to queer SIS’s pitch.

  Rosie explained, ‘I did a job for them, last time out. I think Colonel Buck may have twisted an arm or two, so – yes, you could call it a quid pro quo.’

  ‘You must have rendered them sterling service.’

  ‘I gather it’s worked out quite well.’

  ‘And they briefed you on this bit, I suppose…’

  More a comment than a question. Turning the page, then stopping again. Frowning slightly, quoting: ‘You will as soon as possible establish contact with local Maquis groups, through the good offices of Comte Jules de Seyssons…’ A slow nodding, then, as he scanned the next paragraph. ‘Monsieur le Comte’s to be our banker, I see. Useful fellow.’

  ‘He’s the king-pin,’ she’d agreed. ‘But you’ll see other Maquis contacts mentioned too – Guy Lannuzel at Châteauneuf-du-Faou, and a man called Jaillon further north. Village called Guerlesquin? My priority’ll be to liaise with them and get some drops organized as soon as possible.’

  ‘Drops’ meaning parachute-drops of weaponry. Hallowell nodding… ‘Drops to which we’ll be giving priority. Yes. Then operation “Mincemeat”. Then—’

  ‘More drops, according to requirements, and training and planning for the Great Day.’ Meaning, for action in support of the invasion. Which had to come some time this summer, surely. Spring, or summer. Some time between next week and the end of August, say. This was what Hallowell had meant about getting a lot done quickly – realization having only just dawned that the Maquis and the Resistance generally in that part of Brittany weren’t anything like ready. Finistere wasn’t Section ‘F’ territory – or hadn’t been, until now.

  ‘After “Mincemeat”, the joint’ll be fairly jumping, won’t it.’ Murmuring half to himself again as his eye ran down the headings and paras. Turning another page. ‘Going over this as much as anything for my own info, Rosie. But you are going to have your work cut out, aren’t you, one way and another. Single-handed – organizer, courier and pianist—’

  ‘And District Nurse.’ She added, ‘I can now insert a very swift suppository, I’d have you know!’

  She’d done five days’ work in a Free French hospital ward, French-staffed, at Camberley. Marilyn had giggled, Hallowell looked puzzled; she guessed he didn’t know what a suppository was. Commenting as he shut the file, ‘Cover’s excellent, anyhow.’ Then: ‘Change of subject, Rosie. Do you have any qualms in your mind about “Hector”?’

  She’d hesitated. Her immediate reaction was that ‘Hector’ should be head office’s business, not hers. Except for maybe sixty seconds face to face on a remote landing-field in the small hours of the morning, she wasn’t expecting to have anything to do with him.

  She temporized: ‘Should I have?’

  Decisive shake of the narrow, balding head.

  ‘No. We’re simply – primarily – going through the motions. In pulling him out for de-briefing, I mean. Also to scotch these rumours and uncertainties. For your private information – yours too, Marilyn, and in strict confidence – the source of the allegations against him is highly unreliable. To be precise, we happen to know the motive’s nothing more than sexual jealousy. A Frenchman whom “Hector” himself recruited and whose girlfriend has recently – er – transferred her affections. To “Hector”, d’you see. Unfortunately. One doesn’t applaud or admire him for it – in fact he’s been a damn fool, and he’s in line to be told so in no uncertain terms. But that’s effectively all there is against him, and he happens to have been doing a first-class job for a heck of a long time. Eh?’

  Looki
ng from Rosie to Marilyn, Marilyn gazing back at him with perhaps faint surprise, nothing more. Back to Rosie, then. All three well aware that sexual involvement by SOE agents with local French had always been unequivocally discouraged – for reasons that hardly needed spelling out, but ‘Hector’’s present situation was a good example. Hallowell had shrugged. ‘Always did have a bit of a roving eye. Doesn’t make him a traitor, does it.’

  ‘Is he an Englishman, or—’

  ‘French father, Scottish mother. Educated mostly in Scotland. He was a flyer before he joined us. Right at the start – joined us, I mean – 1940. He’d crashed a light aircraft – after becoming an instructor of some kind. About 1939 – Civil Air Guard, wasn’t it? Papa was pressuring him to join the family firm – engineering business, somewhere south of Paris. But he was having too good a time over here. Post-Varsity, this was. Anyway – did his back in, in the crash, couldn’t ever have parachuted thereafter, and we nearly turned him down. But in other respects he was tailor-made…’

  * * *

  Why tell one all that, she wondered. All she’d asked about was his parental background – which as it happened was similar to her own. Except that her mother was English, not Scots. Rosie had been born in Nice, nearly 26 years ago; she’d been twelve when her father had died and her mother had brought her to England. As for ‘Hector’, though, all that mattered to her was that he’d be at the landing-field near Soucelles tonight. Herself disembarking, ‘Hector’ taking her place for the return trip. As always, the change-over would be made as fast as possible: ideally the Lysander wouldn’t be on the ground for more than four minutes. Confirmation that the plane was coming had gone out this evening in the BBC’s programme of Message Personnels – twice, in the 1700 and 2100 broadcasts – in the form of a statement to the effect that Bertrand had now left hospital. ‘Hector’ himself had set up the rendezvous, of course, with that code-phrase attached to it, as he’d done for arrivals and departures dozens of times before, picking the field and organizing the reception. He was to have rail tickets for her, return halves of those he’d have used himself in getting there, saving her from having to identify herself at the guichet at the small local station, Tiercé. From there she’d be travelling to Angers, thence to Le Mans where there’d be an item for her to pick up from the consigne; he’d be bringing her the ticket for that too. In fact she’d be going further west than Rennes – after making contact with this other réseau’s courier and handing over the half-million francs – but that was none of ‘Hector’’s business.