One Shot Kill (4 page)

She spent an hour sucking water out of the potato peel before the door opened again. She could hardly open her eyes, but recognised Thorwald, the circle-faced officer who’d conducted the first of her brutal interrogations. He sounded like he’d had a few drinks.

‘Hear you’re thirsty,’ he said, as a bulbous guard standing behind made a boyish snigger. ‘Seeing as you put that pain-in-my-arse Huber out of his misery, I’m happy to oblige.’

The big flunky laughed again as Thorwald twisted the nozzle of a powerful hose. Edith crashed to the floor as freezing water shot her in the belly. The cold hurt, but she balled up in the back corner, desperately wringing water from her soaking T-shirt into her mouth.

When Thorwald grew bored, he used the jet to knock over the slop bucket, sending a slick of urine and shit in Edith’s direction. Then he stepped into the cell and sunk his boot heel into Edith’s ribs.

‘You haven’t got long now,’ he said, as Edith shivered. ‘I needed stitches in my wrist, you little bitch.’

Edith fixed him with dark eyes. ‘You’ll all burn in hell,’ she said.

Thorwald laughed. ‘I’m not sure if they’re going to shoot you or hang you. Either way, I’ll enjoy watching.’

*

Eugene had given in to his emotions after returning to the hideout, but quickly reverted to type and began plotting. He offered Rosie an opt out: trying to save Edith was a huge risk, and she didn’t have to take part because his action was grounded in his desire to help a member of his team rather than strict operational need.

‘I’m not running away,’ Rosie said. ‘I’ll do whatever you think is best.’

Tuesday night was cold for late spring. They had coal, but couldn’t burn any in case the Nazis saw or sniffed the smoke. So they laid their sleeping sacks up close and snuggled together in the dark. Rosie gently brushed Eugene’s fingertips and they held hands. She half hoped he’d try kissing her, but he had a mind full of things more important than girls.

The Gestapo’s desire to execute Edith and the two mothers in public before the town’s busy Saturday morning market at least gave them a few days to plan. They had all the weapons and explosives they’d need, plus large sums in French francs and German Reichsmarks which Eugene had brought with him to pay bribes and wages for members of his circuit. But they needed transport and an update on the latest security situation inside Lorient.

Unlike Eugene, Rosie’s face wasn’t known to the Gestapo. She had an impeccable set of fake ID and travelled over the bridge into town on Wednesday morning, under pretence of food shopping.

Eugene asked her to gather as much information as she could about the gallows set-up outside Lorient station, as well as up-to-date details on security checkpoints and bomb damage to roads on the route between Gestapo headquarters and the station.

The town Rosie encountered was utterly different to the one she’d seen two years earlier, when she’d been radio operator for the small team that helped establish the Lorient resistance group. Back then the Allies had a policy of not bombing French towns for fear of killing civilians, but this had been abandoned and Lorient’s huge submarine base made it a prime target.

Over the past year Britain and America had targeted Lorient with over a thousand bomber sorties per month, including several huge raids where hundreds of planes bombed the city in a single night.

The town’s vast U-Boat bunkers were built from four-metre-thick concrete that could withstand direct hits from the largest bombs. But the area around the docks, which once contained bars, clubs, restaurants and the stables where Edith lived, had been repeatedly pummelled, before succumbing to a firestorm that killed more than three hundred and left nothing behind but soot-blackened walls jutting from mounds of charred wood and bricks.

Further inland, Rosie found streets that were less badly scarred, but there was hardly anyone around and a sense of dread had descended over the entire town. There was rubble, broken glass, thousands of Nazi warning notices and the sickening view of dead resistance fighters twisting from the gallows outside the main station.

A huge hand-painted banner at the base of the gallows had swastikas at either end and the slogan:
Disobedience = Death
.

Rosie joined a small queue and used fake ration coupons to buy bread. Eugene had told her of a black-market butcher down a grotty alleyway, but there was no sign of him. An old woman in a shawl said the butcher was dead, then sold her four eggs out of her shopping basket before vanishing over a bombsite.

‘So you’re a laundress?’ a Kriegsmarine
2
guard asked, studying Rosie’s false papers as she tried to leave town. ‘A laundress with dirt under her nails.’

Rosie baulked – her hands were filthy, but a laundress would usually have clean hands and skin blanched by hot water and laundry soap. It was details like this that cost agents their lives.

‘My day off,’ Rosie said uneasily. ‘I was digging in my mother’s garden this morning.’

Luckily the guard was young and Rosie was pretty. Lustful thoughts overwhelmed any chance of him making a link between the girl before him and the female parachutist he’d been told to look out for.

‘I’ll be at the Underground Club from seven tonight,’ the guard said. ‘I’ll buy you a drink if you come and find me.’

He wasn’t bad looking and Rosie giggled as he handed her documents back. ‘Maybe I’ll take you up on that.’

The guard looked pleased with himself as Rosie strolled across the main bridge out of town.

*

Lorient Gestapo was having a quiet week – mainly because they’d just wiped out the local resistance. Word about Thorwald hosing Edith down spread through headquarters and once it became clear that Edith was too weak to fight back the bored investigators had a good deal of fun slapping her around and choking her.

Edith expected more torment when Thorwald opened her door first thing Saturday morning. Instead he gave her milk to drink, before tossing her a tatty linen dress and unmatched wooden clogs.

‘Gonna miss you, Edith,’ Thorwald said. ‘It’s been fun having you around.’

Edith flinched as Thorwald threw a fake jab at her gut.

‘Just kidding.’

But the kick behind the knees was real and Edith’s body slapped the stone floor.

‘Boot slipped,’ Thorwald teased. As Edith moaned in pain, her tormentor’s laughter turned to a bark, ‘Now get that dress on before you
really
piss me off.’

After swapping the filthy vest for the dress and sliding her feet into the clogs, Edith limped blindly into the light outside her cell and needed the banister to support herself as she headed upstairs.

Her legs were feeble as her feet clacked across a marble-floored lobby, full of talking and women at typewriters. Some of them turned to stare: scarcely believing this scrawny teen had caused so much trouble.

Despite her pain, Edith was determined to walk unaided. As she stepped into the villa’s courtyard and took her first outdoor breath in ten days, Thorwald signed her into the custody of the guard who’d been in the interrogation room before she killed Huber. Their ride was the rear compartment of a stately old Renault, with tasselled curtains at the windows.

‘Drive on,’ the guard ordered.

Edith knew they were taking her to die, but felt oddly calm. She’d known they’d execute her from the moment she’d attacked Huber. After five days of torment she just wanted it over with.

As the car rattled over cobbles she wondered if her destination was a firing squad at the town prison, or a more public demise on the gallows outside the train station. She marginally preferred the idea of hanging, imagining a last glimpse at some old friends and shouting something heroic that they’d all remember her by.

But Edith knew this was a fantasy. The Gestapo didn’t have the manpower to deal with large crowds, so they performed hangings at dawn and left the bodies on display for the busy Saturday market.

The car ride gave Edith’s eyes their first chance to adjust to daylight since the night she’d been arrested. It was a clear morning, hinting at a summer she never expected to see. She’d felt her wounds in the dark, but seeing her damaged arms and legs made her queasy and her dress was already stained with liquids oozing from her cuts.

The town had been bombed overnight. Edith hadn’t heard anything, so it had probably been a diversionary raid designed to pull German night fighters away from a bigger attack somewhere along the coast.

Despite the raid’s small scale, the driver had to take a kilometre-and-a-half diversion to avoid a street blocked with rubble, and they had to squeeze past fire crews dousing a smouldering roof.

‘You’d better step on it,’ the guard told the driver, in German.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ the woman replied curtly. ‘Drive over rubble?’

‘You didn’t need to take such a long diversion,’ the guard said. ‘There are much quicker ways.’

Edith had learned a little German since the invasion, but not enough to follow a rapid-fire conversation. The guard grew even more irate as the driver took a left turn into a narrow street lined with bomb-damaged shops.

‘Where does this one get us?’ he shouted. ‘You couldn’t do worse if you were
trying
to take us off course.’

The driver slammed on the brakes, then turned back and scowled at the guard.

‘Fine, I’ll drive,’ the guard said. ‘You sit back here. But keep an eye on her. She may look weak but she’s a terror.’

As the guard tugged on a cord to release the rear-door catch, the driver grabbed a tatty double-action revolver from the map pocket inside the door and shot the guard in the head.

Edith gasped as warm blood spattered her arm. Fearing that the driver would go for her next, she reached for the door handle, but a girl who’d sprung out of an alleyway opened it from outside.

‘I’m with Eugene,’ Rosie explained. ‘Can you walk? We need to move quickly.’

Notes

2
 
Kriegsmarine – Name for the German Navy during the Nazi era.

While Rosie pulled Edith from the car, Eugene walked around the front and tried to calm the trembling driver.

‘You did great,’ Eugene said, as he looked at his ashen-faced German friend.

‘I’ve never shot in anger before,’ she stuttered, as she reached through the driver’s side window and handed Eugene the revolver she’d used to shoot the guard. ‘Now, get it over with.’

The German trembled as she stepped out of the car. On the other side, Rosie was appalled by the state Edith was in, breathing the stench of urine and infected wounds as she helped the younger girl limp into a cobbled pedestrian alleyway.

‘I remember you,’ Edith said, though her ears rang from the gun blast and she didn’t catch Rosie’s reply.

‘Are you ready?’ Eugene asked the driver. ‘Show me the back of your left hand, as if you’ve held it up to shield your face.’

The driver smiled awkwardly as she held the back of her palm out to one side. ‘The things we get ourselves into,’ she said, managing an awkward smile as Eugene lined up the old revolver.

‘You’re completely sure?’ Eugene asked.

‘I agreed to your plan, didn’t I?’ the woman said, as her fear turned to anger. ‘They won’t believe me if I come out of this unscathed.’

Eugene moved the muzzle of the pistol to within half a metre of the outstretched hand and sent a bullet straight through it. The woman screamed and spun backwards, crashing into wooden boards covering what had once been a fishmonger’s shop.

‘Christ,’ Eugene said, feeling awful as he holstered the pistol and cocked the machine gun slung around his neck.

‘Edith’s
really
weak,’ Rosie shouted, from the other side of the car.

‘Just get her clear,’ Eugene shouted back. ‘She weighs nothing. I’ll piggyback her.’

It was a small town and they’d already made a lot of noise. The Germans would arrive within minutes, but Eugene still needed to strafe the car with machine gun fire to make it look as if it had been ambushed by a larger gang.

He worried that the bleeding driver was still too close to the car, so he tucked his hands under her armpits and dragged her a few metres back along the cobbles. Her face was streaked with tears and he felt horrible after all she’d done to help.

‘I’m sorry,’ Eugene told her. ‘They’ll fetch an ambulance for you.’

The woman gave Eugene a half-smile half-grimace. She was losing blood and close to passing out from the pain, but he’d been careful to put the bullet into a spot where it exited cleanly and was unlikely to do lasting damage.

‘Get out of here,’ she groaned. ‘I’m suffering for nothing if you’re caught.’

Eugene opened up with the machine gun. Bullets punched the car’s bodywork, pinged off the engine block, burst tyres and shattered the windscreen. Then Eugene moved to the other side of the car and made sure he got a couple of extra bullets through the guard.

Eugene knew Edith had been knocked around, but it was worse than he’d expected and he gave Rosie a concerned look as he handed her the machine gun.

‘Germans will get here any second,’ Eugene said, as he crouched down low. ‘Edith, I need you to put your hands around my back and hold on tight. OK?’

As Edith wrapped badly bruised arms around Eugene’s neck, Rosie activated three time pencil fuses pushed into blobs of plastic explosive. She pressed the biggest charge under the bullet-shredded car’s wheel arch. Hopefully it would kill the first Germans who arrived to investigate.

The second charge was a coin-sized disc with a miniature two-hour fuse. She pushed it into the blood-soaked pocket of the guard. It would make a big mess in the Gestapo mortuary if they didn’t find it first.

Finally Rosie dumped the third charge in the alleyway. It had a five-minute fuse and half a dozen bullets tied around it. Anyone nearby would think they were being shot at when the plastic exploded and set off the bullets.

Eugene was already moving with Edith on his back. It fell to Rosie to carry a heavy backpack of guns, ammo and explosives, along with the machine gun and her own automatic pistol.