Grey Wolves (36 page)

‘Is that everyone, Captain?’ one of the New Zealanders asked, as Henderson lay gasping in the bottom of the boat. ‘Can we head back to HMS
Gulliver
?’

‘Better get a move on before the Germans find my lantern and spot us in the water,’ Henderson said.

As the small launch turned towards the British torpedo boat anchored a few hundred metres off shore, Rosie knelt over Henderson with a look of concern.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Got winded when I hit the water is all,’ Henderson said as he managed a slight smile. ‘That and the fact that I’m getting far too bloody old for this nonsense.’

Two weeks later

The mission control building on CHERUB campus was a prefabricated Nissen hut and new enough that you could still smell wood glue and paint when you walked in. The main internal feature was a bulky radio set, which would enable direct communication with agents in the field, instead of relying on MI6 for reception and decoding as had happened up to now.

But there were currently no agents in the field, so seventeen-year-old radio operator Joyce Slater was spending most of her time working on indecipherables: transmissions where the decoded signal made no sense. She was part of a highly skilled group of girls – radio operators were all girls – with a talent for unscrambling them.

Joyce usually received five or six each morning in the secure post, and regarded it as a good day if she managed to solve half of them. Today’s envelope had arrived half an hour earlier. Her first step was always to eliminate the hopeless cases. These were usually ones where the message source was a long way away, which meant it was completely garbled, or ones where the notes indicated that an able colleague had already been given a chance to solve it.

As well as the usual typed messages and accompanying notes on the codes used by the operators, today’s messages came with a handwritten note from the head of the MI6 radio section:

Dear Joyce
,

Caroline had a go at this first one overnight, but I thought you might do better as you and Lavender were pals
.

Lavender is on sked at two p.m. today, so please let me know if you crack it so that she avoids a tiresome and risky repeat transmission
.

GLT

Joyce smiled at the thought of Lavender sending an indecipherable message. They’d trained together and Lavender had always scraped through her examinations by one or two marks.

‘Right, let’s see what we’ve got,’ Joyce told herself as she grabbed a clean sheet of squared paper and pulled her wheelchair up to her desk.

Almost immediately, Joyce realised that Lavender had missed the first line of the poem she’d used to encode the message. But Caroline had also worked that out and still got nowhere. Joyce tried a few other tricks such as guessing some of the words and looking for repeated phrases or patterns, but the whole thing was utterly garbled.

Joyce was close to giving up when she remembered that Lavender had an eccentric habit of sometimes writing left to right when she encoded her messages, and sometimes top to bottom. What if she’d encoded top to bottom and transmitted left to right?

This didn’t work, but what if she’d encoded left to right and transmitted top to bottom.

‘Eu-
bloody
-reka!’ Joyce squealed, as the words started to make sense.

The first part of the message was routine information from the Lorient resistance circuit: movements of U-boats, requests for supplies and a report that Hitler had personally ordered the hanging of the German security chief at the Lorient base after the raid. But the final part of the message made Joyce excited:

Madame Mercier has received a brief letter from Marc. His location was cut out by a censor, but he appears to be in a German labour camp awaiting a work assignment. He says he is as well as can be expected and not to worry about him
.

Joyce had never met Marc, but she’d attended his memorial service and the mood on campus had been subdued ever since. She decided to tell Captain Henderson immediately.

There was a telephone within reach, but unfortunately they were still on the waiting list for an army engineer to hook it up. Joyce spun her wheelchair around and pushed herself energetically towards the door at the far end of the hut.

Beyond this door was a fairly steep ramp and she got a thrill as she wheeled down it at speed, turned in a broad arc and pushed on across the concrete playground towards the main building. Her progress was halted by the single step at the main door, but she saw someone through the frosted glass inside and yelled.

‘Excuse me.’

Unfortunately it was Luc. He came to the door in his PE kit, looking strong and healthy with sweat running down his face.

‘What can I do for you, legless?’ he said, grinning nastily, before adopting a squeaky voice. ‘Oh the little cripple girl can’t get up the step. How saaaaad.’

‘Let me in now, you brainless moron,’ Joyce shouted.

‘Not if you’re going to swear at me,’ Luc said, pretending to be outraged.

‘Learn manners, you scum!’ Instructor Takada shouted, as he came out of the school hall behind Luc. He’d been demonstrating the use of a baton to some of the younger kids and gave Luc a brutal whack across the back of the knees, knocking him to the floor. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re even human.’

As Luc rolled around the floor howling, Mr Takada helped Joyce up the step and knocked on Henderson’s door. As Joyce rolled in, she saw Henderson sitting at his desk looking like it was the last place on earth he wanted to be.

‘I’ve cracked an indecipherable, sir,’ Joyce said proudly as she handed over the paper. ‘And I think you’re going to like what it says.’

Frankfurt, Germany, May 1942

The sky was the colour of slate as Marc Kilgour crossed a damp gangplank on to the
Oper
. The old steamer had spent three decades taking passengers along the River Main before fire crippled her. After years sulking at dockside, layered with rust and soot, war had brought her second life as a prison hulk.

Oper
was bedded in a remote wharf east of Frankfurt’s centre and only floated off her muddy berth on the highest tides. All windows above deck had been boarded and the passenger seating ripped out and replaced with stacks of narrow bunks.

Marc had lived aboard for eight months; enough time that the fourteen-year-old barely noticed the stench of bodies and cigarettes, as he walked down a gangway between bunks that was barely wider than his shoulders. Almost all the other men were out at work, leaving behind sweat-soaked straw mattresses and graffiti etched into pine bed slats.

A man groaned for attention as Marc passed. To get off work you had to be seriously ill and while Marc didn’t know him, he’d heard how the big Pole had crushed his hand while coupling freight wagons, then picked up a nasty infection that was working up his arm.

The words came in a half-delirious strain of Polish. The man wanted water, or maybe a cigarette, but he was crazed with pain and Marc upped his pace, wary of getting involved.

The timber stairs that led below
Oper
’s main deck still bore the scars of fire. Charcoal black rungs creaked underfoot as Marc’s hands slid down a shrivelled stair rail. The stench below deck was denser because the air got less chance to move.

All three light bulbs in the passageway had burned out. Marc felt his way, counting eight steps, passing a foul-smelling toilet, then stepping through a narrow door. A mouse scuttled as he entered the wedge-shaped room. Mice were no bother, but the rabbit-sized water rats Marc occasionally encountered freaked him out.

Marc had no watch, but guessed he had an hour before his five roommates returned from twelve-hour shifts in the dockyard. He groped in the dark, finding the Y-shaped twig they used to prop open their oblong porthole.

Fresh air was a privilege – not many cabins below deck had them. The light revealed two racks of three bunks against opposing walls, with a metre of floor space between them. Upturned crates made chairs and a wooden tea chest served as a table.

One of Marc’s predecessors had fixed up a shelf, but everyone kept their mess tins and any other possessions tucked under straw mattresses: theft was rampant and it was riskier feeling around a bunk than stealing from an open shelf.

Marc dug into his trouser pockets, pulled out two small, rough-skinned apples and let them rest on the table. He’d swiped them from the Reich Labour Administration (RLA) office earlier. He was easily hungry enough to eat them, but the six cabin mates always shared food.

They were a decent bunch who looked out for each other. Sometimes Marc would score fruit, bread, or even cake left over after a meeting in the admin offices. His cabin mates who worked in the dockyard or train depot occasionally got their mitts into cargos of food.

The mouse resurfaced, scuttling along a bed frame and out the door as Marc climbed on to his bunk. It was on the third tier of four. With half a metre to the next bunk, it was impossible to sit up.

After sweeping some dead bugs off his blanket, Marc unlaced his wrecked boots. His feet had grown and his only pair of socks was stained dark red where his heels and toes rubbed raw. But the itching under Marc’s shirt bothered him more than his bloody feet.

The straw mattress rustled as he unbuttoned his shirt. Marc was naturally stocky, but prisoner rations had been poor – particularly during the cold months between December and February – and he’d lost all the fat over his rib cage. He scratched at a couple of new flea bites as he aligned his hairy armpit with the light coming through the porthole.

Marc combed his fingertips through the mass of sweaty hairs. Sometimes you had to hunt the louse making you itch, but today a whole family had hatched in one go. He squinted as he picked half-a-dozen sesame-seed-sized body lice out of his armpit, squishing each one against the wall for a satisfying crunchy sound.

The next phase of battle was a hunt for nits – trying to pick out sticky eggs before they hatched. With so many bodies packed on the boat, with most prisoners only having one set of clothes and no proper washing facilities, body lice, fleas and bed bugs were inescapable.

Picking out bugs always depressed Marc. It was hard being far from everyone he knew, being hungry and being forced to work, but the bugs and filth were worst because they meant he didn’t even control the most intimate parts of his own body.

When Marc had done his best with the lice, he turned on to his back and stared at the mildewing wooden slats of the top bunk, less than an elbow’s length from the tip of his nose. He was fiercely hungry and his mind drifted, but his hand slipped under his straw mattress and he smiled warily as he felt a piece of green card in his grubby hand.

Just touching it scared him. He’d been trying to escape since arriving in Frankfurt ten months earlier, and removing it from the administration office was a risk. If everything worked out, a card like this would be his ticket out of Germany. But if he got caught, it could just as easily become his death warrant.

*

Marc was no ordinary prisoner. Reich Labour Administration records said he was Marc Hortefeux, a fifteen-year-old French citizen from Lorient, sentenced for smuggling black-market food, who’d volunteered for agricultural labour in Germany.

In reality he was Marc Kilgour, a fourteen-year-old from Beauvais near Paris. Orphaned shortly after birth, Marc had escaped to Britain after the German invasion of France two years earlier. He’d then been among the first batch of young agents trained to work undercover for an espionage group known as CHERUB.

Imprisoned by the Gestapo during a sabotage mission, Marc had been forced to kill a fellow inmate who’d bullied him. He’d faced a death sentence for murder, but a French prison commandant took pity and agreed to commute Marc’s sentence, provided he volunteered for five years’ labour service in Germany.

To qualify for this programme Marc needed to be fifteen years old. The commandant ensured that Marc’s prison records were lost, and a replacement set drawn up with a false age and giving him a longer sentence. The next afternoon Marc had boarded a train to Frankfurt and he’d been here ever since.

*

‘Sleep, eh?’ sixteen-year-old Laurent shouted, as he slapped Marc gently across the chest. ‘Lazy bastard.’

Marc’s eyes opened as he shot up, almost thumping his head on the bunk above. More than two hundred inmates had finished a shift, and as well as the sound and smell of his roommates, the Oper’s cabins and passageways had come alive with shouts and clomping boots.

‘Just resting my eyes,’ Marc said, as his mouth stretched into a yawn. ‘Reading documents is a strain.’

Laurent shook his head wryly as he unbuttoned a shirt coated in grey dust. ‘Poor little eyeballs,’ he laughed. ‘All we had to do today was haul bags of cement.’

Laurent had been on German rations long enough to get skinny, but he still had the solid jaw and vast fists of someone you wouldn’t pick a fight with.

‘Pen-pusher,’ Marcel added, as he squatted on to the bunk below Marc’s, peeling back his shirt to inspect skin scoured by the heavy sacks.

Marcel’s words were harsh, but the tone was warm. Marc’s cabin mates were envious that his ability to speak German had earned him an admin job, but none of them seemed to resent his good fortune.

Marc rolled on to his side, trying not to inhale a grey haze as four sweating lads stripped off clothes thick with cement dust.

‘There’s a couple of apples on the table,’ Marc said.

‘We’ll get fat on them tiny buggers,’ Marcel replied.

Marcel was a joker. Only fourteen, his crime was to lead cheers in a Rouen cinema when a newsreel showed the aftermath of a British air-raid in Cologne. The Gestapo officer two rows back didn’t see the funny side and Marcel found himself riding to Frankfurt, minus two front teeth.