The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Near Felixstowe, England

I really shouldn’t be here, Gregory Davall thought, as the woman at the door waved him towards one of the smaller rooms. He was a committed Christian, a husband and a father, and a month ago, he had wanted to be one of the voices demanding that the building be burned to the ground. He had said nothing, largely because he knew what interest the Grey Wolves had in the building, but being anywhere near it sickened him. It was all he could do to walk inside, past the German guard, and request a particular girl.

The German guard had even winked at him as he walked past. It had been the first sign of humanity he’d seen from a German, but he was sure that the guard was quietly laughing at him or thinking that there was something wrong with his relationship with his wife. Why else would a married man patronise a brothel?

He glanced around, purely for tactical purposes, of course, as he walked through and into the private room. The building had started life as a small hotel, but had been bought by a madam and turned into a brothel, which was quietly ignored by the mayor and the police. Johnston had once told him that the cat house would have been closed down were it not for the Grey Wolves. They had a very real interest in keeping the place open. Even the Germans, he’d joked, would respect a lady’s time with a client. They’d wait and arrest him afterwards. The door opened at his touch and he stepped into the small room, closing the door behind him.

“Woof, woof,” the girl said as she looked up at him. Davall took one look at her and felt the heat rising to his cheeks. She was young, very pretty, and naked. He could see her pert breasts peeking out from under her long dark hair and his eyes fell downwards to the neat dark triangle between her legs. She sprawled in perfect relaxation with an easy smile, an invitation to any man who saw her. “Aren’t you going to enjoy the view?”

Davall tore his eyes away from her breasts with an effort. Kate was hardly a shrinking violet, and she enjoyed sex almost as much as Davall himself did, but Janine, the prostitute, was far less inhibited. If Johnston was to be believed, she had been born in France and had actually started life as a prostitute there before moving to Britain and working for British Intelligence. She hated the Germans, he’d been told, and yet… she opened her legs for them all the time. If McAllister was to be believed, the German workers spent the most time in the brothel. Perhaps, he’d joked, even screwing in step.

“No,” he said, shortly. Janine didn’t look offended. She just lay back and turned slightly, her hair falling down to cover her breasts completely. “How long do we have?”

“I specialise in the long happy time, so we have around fifteen minutes,” Janine said. “Take your clothes off and sit next to me, if nothing else; you don’t want to be here with your clothes on, do you?”

The correct answer to that one was that Davall wanted to be naked and forget his priorities, but he kept Kate’s face firmly in his mind as he shook his head. Janine shrugged, stood up in one easy motion, and gently pushed Davall onto the bed where she began to massage his neck. Her touch was rougher than expected, perhaps to avoid arousing him more than necessary, but as she whispered in his ear, it began to take an effect on him anyway. Janine could make the most businesslike conversation sound like an invitation to bed.

“I have some clients from the Panzer units that pass through here,” Janine said, her voice a breathy whisper. The reminder that she had slept with the Germans made it easier for Davall to remember that he was married, and that he didn’t really want her. “They were quite keen to chat about their careers and their plans for the future. Some of them were quite boastful after they got some alcohol in them.”

Davall blinked. “Alcohol?”

“I was hired to work for a group of officers for a night as a hostess,” Janine said. “I don’t know what they were thinking; they wanted me to serve them naked, and then each of them had a turn with me or one of the other girls, and then… well, some of them had some odd tastes, but they paid well and they didn’t actually hurt me, and well…”

Her voice trailed off for a long moment. Her breasts brushed against Davall’s back. “They talked, as men will do when they’re under the influence of drink and a woman, and they all believed that there was a major assault being prepared,” she said. Davall stiffened and her hands pushed him back down again.

“In a week, maybe less, the Germans are going to launch a major offensive against the British defence line. They’re a Panzer unit and are determined not to allow any British soldiers to escape them.”

She shivered and said, “I heard one of them talking about how they’d strung up a British boy for shooting at them. I don’t know if they meant it, but…”

Davall scowled. “The BBC was reporting that someone had indeed been hung for firing at the Germans,” he said. The BBC wasn’t really proving very informative, although it outdid Radio Berlin; according to the latter, the entire British Army had been wiped out several times over. He understood that providing honest information would lead to the Germans listening to it as well, but it was still annoying, particularly when he needed the information to plot his next move. “Do you know which one did it?”

“No,” Janine said. “He was pretty drunk at the time and really needed some help to get it up. He almost had a go at me because of his own failure. He might just have been boasting, but everyone I had inside me that night agreed that there was a massive operation being planned.”

“I see,” Davall said. Despite himself, when her breasts touched him again, he felt a tingle of lust passing through his body. He wanted her, and it was hard to remember that Kate existed. She would allow him to take her, too. He could feel it in her body. “Do you know the target?”

“It was the British defence line,” Janine said, leaning closer to him. “I don’t know exactly where, but the dockyard workers were grumbling about having unloaded thousands of artillery pieces and some funny-shaped weapons they didn’t recognise, as well as tons and tons of supplies. I think there isn’t much time left.”

“I guess not,” Davall said, gently pushing her off him. “Do you know anything else?”

“They don’t let me pump them that much,” Janine protested mildly. Davall smiled at the tone in her voice. He desperately needed a cold shower. “They’ll boast and brag, because that’s what men do when faced with a pretty woman, but they don’t usually give me specifics. I can’t ask too many questions without them wondering if there’s a reason why I’m asking them…”

“It’s all right,” Davall said. He gave her a perfectly chaste hug and was surprised to see tears in her eyes. Janine had always seemed so hardened against the rigours of her life, accepting that she would be nothing more than a leman to men, when she was smarter and much more capable than most of them. It would be more dangerous with the Germans, now; the worst any British client could do would be to beat her up, but the Germans would have a worse fate for her, particularly if they caught her spying on them. “I’ll see you soon, all right?”

“You’re a good man,” Janine said. She pulled a robe around herself and hid her body. Davall found it something of a relief. His life was complicated enough without sleeping with her, no matter what he had to do to maintain his cover. “Just make sure it gets out where someone can use it.”

She pointed him out of the room, towards a shower, and beckoned in a German officer. The German was already unbuttoning his trousers as the door closed. Davall felt a moment of rage, wanting to charge back into the room and kill the German before he touched her. He closed his mind, shared the showers with several burly dockworkers who were chatting in loud voices about how good some of the girls were — he was amused to notice that British and German had come together in shared sexual experiences — and then walked away from the docks before anything else could happen.

“Papers, please,” a voice said.

Davall looked up. He’d been so lost in his own thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the German patrol until he’d walked right into it. The four Germans were all focused on him; he struggled through his pockets, pretending not to notice the rifles that were levelled at his chest, and produced the identification card. The Germans examined it and then waved Davall on without even a backwards glance. They’d been doing that all week, sometimes carting off someone unlucky enough not to have a card, including a pair of young boys playing away from home. Those two, at least, had been returned an hour later. The others had been sent into a camp where they worked for hours under the watchful eye of German guards.

Bastards, he thought, as he reached his house. The Davidson family’s house was still empty, although he suspected that the Germans would billet someone there soon enough. The bodies of the two men were still hanging in front of the Town Hall, pour encourager les autres, but no one knew what had happened to the women. He’d been worried that he would run into Davidson’s wife in the brothel but he hadn’t seen any sign of her. He cursed his mistake under his breath; he should have asked Janine, and hadn’t thought to do so.

Kate was out shopping, so he changed rapidly and read one of his technical journals until she came home. Then told her that they were going out for a walk. James joined them as they set out towards the forest, but they didn’t get very far up the road before encountering a German sentry, who checked their papers and curtly ordered them back into Felixstowe. Davall suspected that he would have been a great deal less friendly if Kate hadn’t been there; the Germans would have been more suspicious of a single man on his own. Family walks in the countryside, it seemed, were now out of the question; he felt the noose closing around his neck.

“You’re going back tonight,” Kate said, once James had been dispatched to a friend’s house to play. It wasn’t a question. “Do you have to take such a risk?”

“Yes, I do,” Davall said and kissed her hard enough to make her blink. He made love to her, before holding her for a very long time. It was only when James came home that they separated, ate tea together as a family, and waited until darkness had fallen. He waited another hour after that, watching through the window as the Germans picked up curfew violators, and then slipped out into the night.

He didn’t take the same route this time. He kept very low and well hidden, watching as the Germans patrolled. He wished, for a moment, that he had his sniper rifle with him, but that was back in the secondary arms cache, too far away to recover quickly. The Germans didn’t notice as he slipped past them, into the forest, and moved quickly along a different set of paths.

The Germans had been exploring the forest in the daytime, and he listened carefully for any sign of their presence, but it was all as cold and silent as the grave. In the distance he heard the hoot of an owl, but there was no sign of human life. Even the other Grey Wolves should have remained home tonight.

The moon was shining down when he found the clearing and uncovered the wire and box. It had been carefully sealed, long ago, but he didn’t dare trust it too much; he checked everything carefully before attaching it to the wire. In one of the films he’d seen about spies in Occupied Europe, or in the Security Zone in the east, he would have attached up a speaker, but that was far too dangerous in the woods. Instead, he attached a battery and sent a simple signal down the line, his heart pounding as he waited for a reply.

Gubbins had promised him that someone would be monitoring the secret cables at all times, but if Davall couldn’t get through, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He might have to strike out cross-country and hope he could avoid the Germans, but he knew almost nothing of the area west of Ipswich, and he had no idea where the Germans might be basing themselves. If he ran into them outside Felixstowe, no amount of bluffing would get him out of their clutches. They would know him for what he was…

A light flickered on and off on the small system, and he sighed in relief. He’d learned Morse Code during training, and it was fairly easy to use without making a sound, sending electric pulses down the cable that would appear as a light at the other end.

He’d already composed a short simple message. He informed the listener that the Germans were launching an attack within the next week to ten days. He didn’t know what would happen afterwards, but there was just a chance that they would want to send out additional instructions, asking him to do something else for them, or… maybe even trying to assign him a target. Gubbins had told him to be certain that he could take on a particular target before agreeing. The Grey Wolves had too much at stake to spend themselves needlessly.

The light blinked on and off again, flickering enough for him to read the message as it repeated itself twice; GATHER MORE INFORMATION. He snorted under his breath, although he understood their concern. He’d been briefed on some of SOE’s more embarrassing failures when communications equipment and operators had fallen into German hands. Gubbins had apparently had someone shot for failing to notice that two captured operators had been signalling that they had been captured for weeks, using a covert signal, and therefore allowing several dozen more operatives to fall into German hands. Davall had used the proper codes, but with the German interrogation techniques, that could mean nothing. They didn’t know for sure who he was.

He sent back an acknowledgement and packed up the small device. He returned it to its hole and buried it under enough soil to make it impossible for the Germans to find it by accident. He listened carefully, hearing only small animals and night birds in the distance, and then slipped back towards the town.

Just before he reached the edge of the forest, he heard vehicles and ducked down as a German convoy swept past him, brilliant lights shining through the forest and creating an eerie effect that chilled him to the very core of his being. He could hear voices chatting in German as an infantry patrol marched up the road, some of them clearly barking orders to the others. He kept low, watching as they marched onwards. They didn’t seem to have seen him, but they might have been trying to act as beaters, driving him into the arms of a different German patrol.

A policeman was standing near a house, watching for curfew-breakers. Davall felt a moment’s pity for the officer, before reminding himself that the police had been forced to help the Germans. In order to protect the remainder of the town from reprisals, the police would give up the Grey Wolves if they knew who they were. Rumour had it that police families had already been taken as hostages. There was no way to know if that were true, but it might provide useful information if it could be confirmed at a later date.

He kept low as a second German convoy raced off into the distance and then slipped into his own garden. Kate had left the house completely dark, as he had instructed her, and it was easy to open the door and slip inside.

He considered his orders as he undressed and climbed into bed besides a warm and welcoming Kate. The higher-ups wanted more information, but unless Janine took a senior officer to bed and somehow got more information from him, he couldn’t see how the Grey Wolves could obtain such information, unless…

The idea grew in his mind. It was risky, almost crazy, but it might just work.