Code Name Verity(93)

What went wrong?

I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t a trap. We weren’t outnumbered, not at first. I suppose we were just playing for higher stakes than the Germans. Shouldn’t we have guessed they’d be more ruthless than us? How could we guess? We were pretty ruthless.

What went wrong – perhaps it was just too dark, night and fog both. The fog was good as well as bad because it hid us, but it was just so hard to see. There should have been a quarter moon, for what that’s worth, but the sky was overcast, and we were blind until the prison bus turned up with its headlights blazing.

That bit went well – within a minute we had thoroughly disabled it. We were pretty well camouflaged in the riverbank scrub – a tangle of willow and alder and poplar full of mistletoe. Lots of tall, withering weeds hiding us, and the fog too. Our small explosion hurt no one except the bridge and the bus. The radiator grille got blown out, but the blast missed the headlights and the battery must have been OK because there was enough light that Paul and the owner of the Rosalie somehow managed to put bullets through three of the tyres.

The driver got out. Then a guard got out. They had electric torches – both men walked up and down the length of the bus inspecting the damage and cursing.

Paul picked them off like ducks at a funfair with his Sten submachine gun. While that was going on I was curled uselessly in a ball with my arms over my head and my teeth clenched, so I missed a bit of the action. Born to be a soldier, my foot. A raid is actually quite a lot like a battle. It is war. It’s war in miniature, but it’s still WAR.

Two other guards came out of the bus and fired random shots into the bushes at us in the dark. Mitraillette had to sit on me to stop me blowing our cover, I was in such a flap. Finally Paul gave me a clout over the head.

‘Get a grip on yourself, Kittyhawk,’ he hissed. ‘We need you. You’re a crack shot, but no one’s expecting you to kill anybody. Focus on tools, all right? They’ll start trying to fix things in a moment. Try to disable their equipment.’

I gulped and nodded. Don’t know if he saw me nodding, but he shifted back to his own position beneath the gently rustling willowherb and hemlock alongside the Rosalie driver, and they bagged another guard.

The surviving guard leaped back into the bus. There was an ominous silence – not a thing happened for a minute or two. Then the four remaining soldiers ushered every single one of the prisoners out of the bus and made them lie down side by side on their faces in the middle of the road. It was all done by the glancing light of electric torches and we didn’t dare fire at anyone now, for fear of hitting one of ours.

Couldn’t see any individual faces – couldn’t tell anything about the captives, not their age or their sex or how they were dressed, but you could tell by the way they moved that some of them were scared and some were defiant, and some were chained together by their feet. The chained ones had a hard time getting down to the road, tripping each other up as they climbed off the bus. When everybody was lined up on their faces in the mud like sardines, one of the guards shot six of them in the head.

It happened SO FAST.

This dreadful man shouted at us in French. Mitraillette whispered all the English words she could come up with in my ear – ‘Revenge – two for one – their own dead. If we kill – ’

‘I know, I know,’ I whispered back. ‘Je sais.’ For every one of them we murdered they would murder two of us. Disposable hostages.

Three guards kept their guns trained on the prisoners while the fourth set off on foot back down the road – to find a telephone, I think.

Then we waited. Stalemate. It was bitterly cold.

Paul and a couple of other men had a quick, whispered council and decided to work their way beneath the bridge and try to attack the guards from behind. There really were only three guards left, plus the one who had gone for help – it seemed impossible we shouldn’t be able to get the better of them.

But they had 18 hostages lying helpless and chained at their feet.

And one of their hostages was Julie.

Or perhaps, I worried then, perhaps she’d already been shot. Impossible to tell at first. But then the guards set up a portable floodlight attached to the bus’s battery, and got the prisoners spotlit, and you could see now that only a few of them were women, and that everybody looked half-starved. And among them, right in the middle of them, was the one I was looking for – a mound of blonde hair and a flame-coloured pullover. Her arms were bound tightly behind her back, with wire it looked like, so she really was lying flat on her face more than the others who were resting on their forearms. But she wasn’t at the end of the row; she wasn’t one of the six that had just been killed. She was breathing quietly, waiting. Shaking with cold like the rest of us.