Turning the Storm (The After Dunkirk Series Book 3) Page 6

  Yet behind him on Sergeant Farlan Pirie’s screen was the manifestation of the electronic apparatus, and tonight, that compact air intercept system would perform in its first combat deployment.

  Behind Jeremy, Farlan sat still, watching his magic box intently.

  Subsequent radio traffic from Boffin gave Jeremy a mental picture of the situation: the German bombers lumbered through the night sky over the Channel and heading north on a line west of Leicester, apparently headed toward Birmingham. Boffin vectored Jeremy on a wide curve that brought his Beaufighter behind their leading formation.

  “Closing in,” he muttered to himself. “Remember tactics. Their gunners can’t see you. When you hit, watch for falling debris. Dive and veer off but keep your general direction until clear. Pay attention to the controller. Return to airfield, reload, refuel. Do it again. The night is your friend.”

  “You have contact ahead,” Boffin called.

  Farlan heard and swallowed hard. Success now rested on him to guide Jeremy into position dead astern of the tail. “Modify course two degrees port.” He watched the blip crossing his screen at an accelerating speed. “Increase climb rate and angle.”

  Jeremy brought the Beaufighter’s nose up slightly and nudged his throttle.

  “Steady,” Farlan called. “Steady. You should see him at any moment.”

  Suddenly, far out to his left, Jeremy saw flashes that he recognized as coming from the muzzles of Hispano cannons, followed by tiny white flashes of light from high explosive rounds impacting against a hard object. And then, tracers flew in the opposite direction as the gunner on the German bomber returned fire.

  For a second, Jeremy wondered if the historical significance of the moment had been impressed on Anderson or Cunningham as it had on him. One of them had just scored, and Jeremy had just witnessed the first use of air-to-air radar to engage an enemy aircraft.

  Scarcely had the thought entered his mind when more flashes farther away in the dark sky signaled that yet more Hispano cannons had been fired by another Beaufighter, but no telltale signs indicated any hits.

  Suddenly, right above Jeremy, a deeper black appeared against the starlight of the night sky. Acting on instinct, Jeremy jammed his stick forward and to the left, stepped on his corresponding pedal, and dove. Too late. He heard the wrenching of metal on metal as his tail scraped along the belly of his German target.

  The mood in the dispersal hut was muted when Jeremy trudged in with Farlan after limping his kite back to RAF Middle Wallop. Cunningham had downed a German bomber, but his natural modesty precluded overt celebration. Jeremy’s calamity contributed a dampening effect.

  Fortunately, although his stabilizer had been bent and twisted, it had provided sufficient aerodynamic constancy that, with persistent manipulation of the controls, allowed him to land the aircraft safely. Shining his torch on it after climbing down from the cockpit, he shook his head in wonder at the impossibility of what he had just done.

  “Cunningham proved that the concept works, but we have more work to do,” Anderson said after Jeremy reported what had happened to his aircraft. “He hit one, but the collision nearly cost us dearly. Judging the closure rate and getting that visual contact are crucial.” He addressed Cunningham. “Tell us what you did. How did you get visual sighting and engage the target?”

  Cunningham reached over and nudged Jeremy. “Glad you and Sergeant Pirie are still with us, mate.”

  Jeremy smiled bleakly in acknowledgment.

  “First off,” Cunningham began, “what I did is replicable. We can train others to do it. Initially, I saw ground searchlights swarming across some clouds, so I figured the bombers must be passing over in that vicinity. That aspect alone is one we should pass along to our chaps on the ground. That was an immense help. As we got closer, my operator, Jimmy, locked onto the blips on his screen and fed me estimates of speed, distance, and height.

  “One thing I can tell you that we anticipated wrongly is the notion of looking for the glow around their engines. It’s not that they don’t exist but that we are searching the skies for something specific.

  “Jimmy first spotted the aircraft from about twelve thousand feet behind and above the bomber. I lowered my landing gear, using them as airbrakes to decelerate and descend below him. Jimmy continued to feed me course, altitude, and attitude corrections until I saw a patch of sky that was darker than the rest. I’m not sure that’s the most accurate way to describe it, but that patch didn’t have any stars. As we closed in, it grew wings and a tail, and I knew we had our target, and when we were about three hundred feet below it, we even identified it as a Heinkel HE 111. We could tell by its elliptical tail.

  “We cut loose with all of our weapons, including some of the rockets, but then the pneumatic firing device failed, and about that time, the wretched man in the gunner’s cupola started firing back at us.” He laughed. “We saw our tracers hit, but the bugger wouldn’t go down. We followed the bomber as it turned before reaching its target and descended as it headed out to sea. That is one tough aircraft. We saw the hits, and at first, they seemed to have no effect. We were out of ammunition by then and running out of fuel, so we took it on in. As a result, we can claim only a probable kill, but our technology and tactics worked.”

  Everyone in the group had listened, mesmerized. Then Anderson turned to Jeremy. “We need to analyze what went right and what went wrong. Don’t feel bad about what happened to you.” He grinned with empathy and clapped his own chest with a gesture of futility. “I thought I saw our target. I fired. I missed. Just tell us how your collision came about.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Besides seeing the bandit, I think the hardest part is gauging how fast we’re overtaking it. We’re flying faster, and we want to hit them from below, which means we’re coming at them nose up. We have to keep that attitude until after we’ve fired.

  “My error was in not seeing the target in time to shoot and dive. I undershot. What Cunningham just said about not searching for something specific in a night sky, like engine glow, is brilliant. That glow is so low intensity that we’ll probably rarely see it.

  “Farlan zeroed in on my target perfectly. I saw it, too late, while I was looking for the glow. So, we need to practice coming up behind the target without flying or shooting in front of it or colliding with it.”

  The next morning, Jeremy picked up a newspaper someone had left on a table in the dispersal hut. Its headline read, “Liverpool Blitzed.” Pictures of a gutted downtown took up the middle section, with relics of tall buildings reduced to rubble, smoke rising from blackened ruins, and people huddled together, many of them injured. Blankets covered many human forms.

  Jeremy shook his head sadly and was about to put the paper back on the table when another smaller headline below the fold caught his eye. “Beaufort Night Fighter Brings Down German Bomber.” The subheading read, “Flight Lieutenant John ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham Shoots Down Target in the Dark.”

  The article extolled the heroism of three pilots of 604 Squadron racing through the night to Leicester, and highlighted their incredible night vision, in particular Cunningham’s.

  “If they only knew,” Jeremy breathed. Anderson had informed Group Headquarters, Fighter Command, and the Air Ministry of the night’s success, and the government was making the most of the attack’s propaganda value. Jeremy was well enough acquainted with Cunningham to know that the man shunned celebrity status. But Jeremy also perceived a method to the madness in the publicity: Britons needed winning heroes, and Germany might realize a vulnerability that could become a deterrent.

  6

  Marseille, France

  Madame Marie Madeleine Fourcade called Henri Schaerrer and asked him to send Phillippe Boutron to meet with her that afternoon. “I’d like to come along,” Henri said.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” she replied.

  “We can discuss that when I arrive,” he said. “Phillippe will come later, depending on the outcome of our discussio
n.” His voice was pleasant, and she knew him to be a genuinely friendly person, so his pushback came as a surprise, but she also understood that Phillippe was the best man on Henri’s teams. She had already used the former French naval officer in a highly sensitive operation once before without informing Henri of the details. She had a hunch that Henri was not willing for her to do so again.

  She was a small woman, highly intelligent and well educated, with a thin face and smooth skin, pretty with rounded eyes and a square chin. Her short, straight hair changed with tactical demands, and she melded into crowds at a moment’s notice. Few would suspect that she helped organize and run a Resistance network.

  When she and Henri met on the veranda of her villa overlooking a grand view of the sparkling blue Mediterranean, he immediately launched into the issue. “I stipulated that if I recruited my former naval colleagues into your Resistance organization, that I would run that part of the organization. You agreed to that.”

  “No argument,” Fourcade said, “but the mission I have for Phillippe is a continuation of the one he executed last summer. What we need him to do is even more crucial. I don’t spell out the details to you for operational security reasons. If anyone associated with the mission is caught and breaks under interrogation, good people will die, networks will be blown, and if the Gestapo traces it back to here, our entire organization could be lost.”

  Henri regarded Fourcade with a doubtful look. “Am I always to be kept in the dark? We had an agreement.”

  Fourcade reached over and touched his arm. She liked and trusted Henri as much as anyone she had ever known, and she disliked making him feel distrusted. Swiss by birth, he was tall with a strong build, dark hair, and a ready smile. Having wanted a naval career since childhood, he had taken a commission in the French navy where he gained wide acceptance and respect among his peers. After the French had capitulated and disbanded most of its navy, he had joined her Alliance group of the French Resistance and recruited many of his former colleagues.

  “I’ve lived up to our arrangement in every respect including Phillippe’s operation. I discussed it with you and secured your permission before acting, as we had agreed that I should.” She pulled back and watched him fondly. “Henri,” she entreated, “I think so highly of you that I got British intelligence to send Jeremy Littlefield here for the sole purpose of convincing you to bring in your former navy comrades to join us.”

  He sat eyeing her without speaking.

  “Do you trust Phillippe?” Fourcade asked.

  “With my life,” Henri replied without hesitation.

  “Do you trust me?”

  He nodded reluctantly. “You know I do. I think maybe you don’t trust me.”

  “Let’s put that to rest. Before today, I had not considered you might think that. Talk to Phillippe. Ask him if he thinks the security arrangements around this operation should stay the same. If he says you should be read in, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we go forward as things are. Agreed?”

  Rising from his seat, Henri took a deep breath. “We can resolve that right now. He’s waiting down the road.”

  Five minutes later, Henri re-joined Fourcade on the terrace, bringing Phillippe with him. She explained the dilemma.

  Phillippe had been a gunnery officer aboard the French dreadnaught Bretagne as part of the French fleet anchored in Algeria when British warships destroyed the ships to keep them out of Nazi hands following France’s surrender. That action embittered French naval officers toward the British. Convincing them to join the Brits in supporting the French Resistance had been no easy feat.

  Phillippe had been furious and ashamed that France surrendered to Germany, especially after only five weeks. Fiercely patriotic, he had railed against his leadership to the brink of insubordination when it refused to either scuttle their fleet or surrender it to the British to keep it out of German hands. He had been the first among Henri’s colleagues to urge joining forces with Fourcade.

  Now, he listened quietly as she disclosed the dilemma about how much Henri should know about Phillippe’s operation, and then remained silent for a few moments with his own thoughts. When he spoke, he directed his first comments to Fourcade. “I think the difficulty lies in who is taking the risks.” He gestured toward Henri. “We are out among the population, actively recruiting and already carrying out sabotage operations. In combat, you trust and fight for the person to your left and right. If that trust is broken…” He shook his head. “I understand my friend’s reluctance.”

  Fourcade shoved aside a sudden surge of annoyance. “I see your view,” she said, addressing both men. “I’d like you to see mine.” She focused her attention on Henri. “You two have done a marvelous job of building your organization, but yours is not the only one that traces to me, nor is it the only one that we recruit for.

  “We have a school-age girl living with Maurice and his family. You know her, Chantal Boulier, and she is not attending school because the risk is too high, so we must hide her during the day. Her father leads a major network in the north. Her sister, Amélie, as you know, is active in another part of the Resistance. Just having Chantal with us could draw unwelcome attention.

  “That’s only one of our many vulnerabilities. Maurice is constantly recruiting, but as opposed to your activities to bring in former known colleagues, he’s often dealing with and trying to vet friends of friends—people he doesn’t know, including criminal elements with valuable skills, like forging identification and travel documents. And that’s only one of several organizations we work with.

  “All of those threads lead back to me. I have to be ready to move myself and my immediate staff to safety at a moment’s notice, and we are in frequent radio contact with London, which adds further jeopardy from detection by signal-direction finders. My point is that we are all in constant danger, which is why operational security is a must.” She caught herself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to prattle on.”

  She turned to Phillippe. “You know the nature of the mission and the stakes. I trust your judgment. Should Henri know the details of the operation you went on or not? The issue is important now because there’s more to do. You know the lives at risk.”

  Phillippe stared at Fourcade, his eyes narrowed and hard. “Is Swan in danger?” he asked.

  “Yes, and British intelligence’s SOE desires that we alleviate the situation.”

  Phillippe leaned back as he contemplated what to say. Swan was the codename for Jeannie Rousseau, the spy inside the German 10th Army Headquarters in Dinard. He had helped establish communications with her after Amélie Boulier had recruited her for the Resistance.

  An incredibly intelligent young lady with high education and gifted with a photographic memory, Jeannie was also elegant and beautiful. Known for treating everyone with courtesy and respect, she had gained the attention of the German command in Dinard as a capable interpreter and translator, being fluent in five languages, including German. Deliberately coquettish, she had charmed her German masters into revealing military secrets. Through first Amélie and then Phillippe, she had shared what she learned with Fourcade, who passed the information on to British intelligence.

  During their last meeting, Jeannie had delivered to Phillippe detailed maps, sketches, lists, and tables drawn from memory of documents she had seen and conversations she had overheard inside the headquarters. Taken together, they detailed troop strength, headquarters locations, ammunition storage dumps, staging sites, schedules, contingencies, and all manner of detailed information regarding Operation Sea Lion, the impending German invasion of England. Based on information she supplied, RAF Bomber Command had carried out raids on key military installations along the French Atlantic coast.

  On that day when he last met with Jeannie, Phillippe saw plainly the toll her activities took on her psyche. To add to her discomfort, a particular German SS officer, Major Bergmann, seemed to suspect her. Phillippe had offered to “take care” of the major or otherwise help her leave the area, bu
t she had declined, re-stating her duty to help in any way she could to defeat the Nazis. Apparently, the danger had intensified.

  Phillippe turned to Henri. “You are my friend,” he said. “I pledged to follow your orders for our Resistance. Tell me you need to know these details, and they’re yours, but hear me out first. We’re military men. We share everything about our lives, but sometimes we possess critical security secrets we cannot divulge, even to each other.

  “This is that kind of secret. It’s got to be kept among the fewest number of people, and the identities of those people must be protected.” He cupped a hand behind Henri’s neck and spoke, eye to eye. “I know you care about the people in our organization; you feel responsible for supporting and keeping them safe while they do dangerous things. Sometimes, you must keep your hands off and trust the individuals. This is one of those times. If I’m killed fighting for France, I can’t ask for a more worthwhile death.”

  Henri listened without interruption while Phillippe spoke. He regarded his friend solemnly for a few moments, and then turned to Fourcade. “We’re in this fight together. I leave the mission and Phillippe in your hands.”

  He started to leave, but Fourcade stopped him. “Please wait. There’s more for us to discuss once I’ve finished with Phillippe.”

  After Fourcade and Phillippe had conferred, they met again with Henri long enough for goodbyes. “You made a wise choice,” Phillippe told his friend. “I must go. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  They grasped hands, clapped each other’s backs, and Phillippe departed. Fourcade started to lead Henri back out to the terrace, but he stopped her. “I apologize,” he said. “I hadn’t considered your danger. I make matters worse by being here.”

  Fourcade tossed her head. “You’re here because I welcomed you here.”