Tamar (3 page)

Nicholson put his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned against the wall. “I understand your concerns,” he said. “We all do. Your fellow countrymen have endured appalling suffering under the occupation. We are deeply concerned for the Dutch people, believe me. But what we are now thinking about is the liberation of Europe.
Europe.
Not individual countries. We will defeat Germany. There’s no doubt about that. And there’s a race on. The Americans want to get to Berlin and drag Hitler kicking and screaming out of his bunker before the Russians do. Which means that pockets of the German army will get left behind to be mopped up later. In Denmark, for example.”

“And Holland,” Tamar said quietly.

“And northern Holland, yes.”

“So what will we be doing? Sitting here on our highly trained arses doing crosswords?”

Nicholson almost smiled. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re not that lucky. You’ll both be in Holland in less than a week. You, Dart, will be doing what you expected to be doing as Tamar’s WO. Your cover story remains unchanged. You’re still Dr. Ernst Lodders.”

“Lubbers, sir,” Dart said.

“Sorry, Lubbers. So your medical training will still be useful. However, you’ll be operating from three transmission stations, not two. It means you’ll have to move about a bit more, but on the bright side it’ll make it harder for German radio detectors to pin you down. You’ll be given your new schedules and ID codes this afternoon.”

Tamar said, “I get the feeling that I’m the one with the problems. Do you want to tell me what they are, Colonel?”

“You’ll get an intensive briefing beginning this afternoon at 1500 hours,” Nicholson said.

“Am I still to organize strategic acts of sabotage?”

“No.”

“Am I still Douwe Schoeten, the railway maintenance engineer and Nazi sympathizer?”

“No.”

“Christ,” Tamar said. “I’ve been him for three months. Who the hell am I now?”

By three o’clock the room was full of sunlight. Nicholson sat looking out of the bay window, apparently watching a game of tennis that Tamar could hear faintly but not see. The man called Hendriks sat at the table. He was rather overweight and unhealthy in complexion; the flesh of his face looked as if it had been moulded out of dough by a baker with dirty hands. He took an ID booklet from his briefcase and slid it across the table to Tamar.

“Christiaan Boogart,” he announced. “Taken into Germany as forced labour in 1941. Contracted tuberculosis winter ’43. Failed to make a full recovery, therefore of no further use to the Third Reich. Repatriated. Now an itinerant farmworker.”

Tamar didn’t look at the ID. He didn’t need to. “Again? I’m Boogart
again
?”

Nicholson said, with his back to the room, “We thought you might be pleased. A bit less homework for you to do.”

“But, sir. Boogart? He’s an agricultural labourer. What would he be doing in Rotterdam?”

“You’re not going to Rotterdam,” Hendriks said calmly.

“What?”

Nicholson glanced round, his face inscrutable against the light.

“You’re not going to Rotterdam,” Hendriks repeated.

As Tamar gazed at him blankly, Hendriks leaned forward on his elbows, his plump hands clasped. “In your opinion,” he asked, “would it be fair to describe the Dutch resistance as fragmented? Disorganized?”

“What? Er . . . no. It would be fair to describe it as a bloody shambles.”

“That’s perhaps a little harsh. But, yes, the different resistance organizations have been mounting operations without any central planning. A bomb here, an ambush there, a train derailed, a telephone exchange blown up. Fine things in themselves, but not adding up to anything really useful. And the Germans are taking terrible reprisals for such actions. Their jails are packed with what they call
Todeskandidaten
. You know what the word means?”

“It translates as ‘death candidates,’” Tamar said.

“That’s right. It’s a system they were beginning to operate when you were last there, a year ago. Every time there’s a so-called ‘terrorist outrage’ the Gestapo drag a dozen or so poor bastards out of prison and shoot them in the street. Making sure the locals are watching, of course. We don’t think it’s worth it. Do you?”

Tamar didn’t answer immediately; then he said, “It’s a complicated question.”

Nicholson interrupted again. “Not to me, it isn’t,” he said. “Several of our people — your colleagues — are death candidates right now. Austin is. So are Holvoet and Dubois. Thijssen too.”

Tamar looked at the colonel. “Thijssen? Jan Thijssen?”

“Correct,” Nicholson said. “Your old boss. He’s banged up in Apeldoorn.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“No. They kept him alive, poor sod. I don’t much fancy his chances if we don’t get a grip on things.”

Hendriks cleared his throat officiously. “The point is that these hostages will be sacrificed if we do not establish discipline. For this and other reasons it is now an absolute priority to get all resistance groups to bury their differences and work together. You would agree that this is desirable?”

Tamar made an unnecessary sign of agreement.

“Therefore,” Hendriks said, sounding proud of himself, “what we’ve done is divide Holland into sixteen zones. Each of these zones will have a commandant who will persuade — at gunpoint if necessary — the various resistance groups to unite under his control. Once that is achieved, the resistance will only conduct operations authorized by Delta Centrum in Amsterdam. You, Tamar, are to be the commandant of zone six. Now, I want to show you this.”

The file he plopped onto the table had a brown cardboard cover with a thick red band running diagonally across it.

“This contains everything we know about your area as it is at present. It is as detailed as we can make it. We cannot guarantee that the information regarding the positions of German troops is entirely accurate. It was accurate last week, but . . .”

Tamar put up a hand, palm out, the way you might shield light from your eyes. “Please,” he said, “tell me something simple. Where are you sending me? What is zone six?”

Nicholson turned away from the sunlight and the tennis and said, “Your old turf. Where you were last time.”

Tamar’s heart stumbled like a happy drunk.

“You got out clean,” Nicholson continued. “You know the geography. And we need someone good near the front line. That’s why we’re resurrecting Mr. Boogart. It’s a largely rural area. Who else but an itinerant farmworker would be roving about?”

Hardly daring to, Tamar asked, “And where will I be? What are the safe houses?”

Hendriks tapped the file impatiently. “The information you need is all in here. At the moment, we believe that the Maartens farm is the best option. You do remember the place?”

Tamar lifted his face to the window, dazzling his eyes with the sun that now burned directly through the smeared glass. Praise God. “Yes,” he managed to say. “I remember it.”

An unfamiliar feeling grew huge inside him. Then he recognized it: joy.

Something in the dazzle moved: Nicholson lifting his arm to look at his watch.

“Now then, Tamar. Here’s the drill. You’ve got this room for the next twenty-four hours. Learn everything in that file, and then lose it in some remote part of your brain. As if you’ve completely forgotten it. Do you understand? Right. You’ll be here again at 1500 hours tomorrow, when Mr. Hendriks will test you on your prep and answer any further questions you might have.”

“Sir.”

At the door, Nicholson paused. “This is Dart’s first time,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“I guessed.”

“That worry you at all? A bit of a moody bugger, is he?”

“I don’t think so. He’ll be fine.”

“Good. But I don’t want you nursemaiding him, hear me? That’s one reason we’re tucking him away in Albert Veening’s nuthouse. We don’t want him near you all the time. We can just about afford to lose him, but we can’t afford to lose you as well. If we do lose him, you might have to be your own WO for a while. For that reason, you’ll have your own set of silks. Now, get your nose into that file.”

“Sir? May I ask when Dart and I will be going in?”

“There’s a three-quarter moon in four days’ time. The weather forecast looks reasonable. That’s the timetable we’re looking at. Is that soon enough for you?”

Tamar and Dart sat in a dingy, blacked-out brick shed that contained a table, four chairs, a telephone, and a good deal of cigarette smoke. Tamar wore a scuffed leather jacket over a high-necked sweater and grubby denim dungarees. Dart looked rather more respectable in a dark tweed overcoat and corduroy trousers. Outside, at the edge of the bleak airstrip, a Stirling bomber was warming its engines, and every time they faltered, Tamar’s heart faltered with them. The surface of the table was covered by a map of Holland brightly lit by the big lamp suspended from the ceiling. The young SOE officer was called Lennon, and he had a heavy cold; the edges of his nostrils were raw. He would have preferred the two agents not to smoke but didn’t think it was reasonable to ask them to stop. He wiped his nose with a crusty handkerchief and tapped a pencil on the map.

“We last used this dropping zone seven weeks ago,” he said. “It is, as far as we know, quite secure. There are small German garrisons here and here.” He drew faint crosses with his pencil. “They might look uncomfortably close, but it seems they are lazy buggers who don’t like going out at night. It’s mostly marshy ground out there. Ponds and so forth. So you might get your feet wet. On the plus side, there aren’t many roads good enough for German armoured cars and whatnot to pootle about on.”

Pootle,
Tamar thought. God, these British.

“The plane will make two passes over the DZ. Five of the containers will be dropped first. If there are Germans there and all hell breaks loose when those go down, we’ll bring you back and try again at a later date. All right?”

“All right.”

“On the second pass, the sixth container, the one with your stuff in it, will go first, then you. There’ll be a big reception committee, so don’t get confused. They all know what to do. When everything’s been sorted out, you’ll be taken in two separate vehicles to the Maartens farm. You, Dart, after checking the radio there, will then be taken to your base, which is, um, here.” He poked his pencil at the map. “It’s a shade less than three kilometres outside Mendlo.”

Lennon gasped and threw his head back so violently that for an instant he appeared to have been shot. He sneezed explosively into his handkerchief three times, and then, as if nothing had happened, continued. “Good. Next thing. The weather people tell me there’s a fifty-knot headwind tonight. That means the flight will take approximately two hours and twenty minutes. You’re going to get bloody cold sitting in the belly of that Stirling. So I’ve brought you these.”

He reached into his coat pocket and took out two flat metal flasks. “Whisky. Not enough to get you squiffy, but it’ll help keep the heart rate up to scratch.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Not at all. Now then. These damn things.” Lennon took an ordinary brown envelope from his inside pocket, opened it, and tipped two signet rings onto the map. They were rather chunky, similar in design, and didn’t look new. One was engraved with the letters CB; the other, a touch more fancily, with the letters EL.

“You’ll know what these are. Here’s how you open them.” He picked up the EL ring. “Just slip your nail in here, see? And then a little twist . . .”

The engraved panel swivelled to reveal a tiny compartment. A capsule of cyanide nestled snugly inside. Dart leaned forward to examine his suicide pill more closely.

Lennon cleared his throat and said, “Apparently, the best thing to do is just lick it out with your tongue. It’s a bit fiddly to get at with your fingers. Don’t forget to crunch before you swallow, of course.”

He snapped the ring shut and wiped his nose again. Tamar slid his ring onto the second finger of his right hand; Dart found that his fitted best on the third finger of his left hand, where normally a wedding band would be worn.

“How’s that feel?” Lennon asked. “Comfy?”

The door opened, and an RAF man lugged two parachutes into the room.

Looking at Dart, Lennon said, “We need a signal from you at 0648 hours tomorrow confirming that you are both in place. We must get that signal. Otherwise, we’ll have to assume that things have ballsed up. If that happens, you are out there on your own. And I think you know what that means.”

He stood up. “Right then. Flight Sergeant McKay here will help you on with your chutes and check them for you. Take-off in how long, Rory?”

“Soon as we’re on board, sir.”

“Super,” Lennon said, rubbing his hands together. It seemed he had something more to say, but he paused awkwardly. “Um . . . Any letters, at all?”

Puzzled, Tamar said, “Letters, sir?”

Lennon hid his discomfort in his handkerchief. He busied himself with his nose and then said, “Well, you know. Some of you, some of your colleagues, have left letters with me. For me to deliver. To loved ones, nearest and dearest, that sort of thing.”

Tamar and Dart looked at him blankly.

“No? Fine. Excellent. That’s it then, I think.” He held out his hand, and Tamar and Dart got to their feet and shook it in turn. “Good luck. You’ll be fine; I know it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Tamar said.

Lennon picked up his briefcase, buttoned his coat, and left. Outside, he began a long bout of violent sneezing punctuated by curses, all clearly audible inside the shed.

Two hours later the farmworker and the doctor were semi-rigid with cold and numbed by noise, so they were startled when they looked up and saw Flight Sergeant McKay leaning over them, supporting himself on the steel ribs of the plane.

“We’re about to cross the Dutch coast. The skipper will start to bank and weave to avoid antiaircraft fire in about five minutes. You’ll get chucked about a bit. Try not to puke, okay?”

They nodded, dumb.

McKay leaned closer. “Did Lennon give you a spot of whisky apiece? Aye, I thought so. He pays for it out of his own pocket, you know. Now would be a good time to take it. I’ll be back in a while. All right?”