The Invasion of 1950

Chapter Thirty-Three

Felixstowe, England

The sun beat down upon Gregory Davall’s back as he took the box from the person in front of him and passed it to the person behind him, and then the next, and then the next, passing the boxes in what felt like an endless stream. He hadn’t been into the dockyards proper for years — even when visiting Janine, he hadn’t been allowed into the dockyards themselves — now, standing on the docks, he silently cursed the Germans under his breath. Hot sweat poured down his back and he wished, silently, for the drink of water, but their hour wasn’t over yet. The boxes were passed on to the rear, where German quartermasters loaded them onto lorries that drove off into the distance and then went off, he supposed, to the front lines.

The Germans had bagged him yesterday, sending one of the policemen around to people on a list who didn’t have anything to do on a day-to-day basis, rounding them all up and ordering them to help with the unloading. They had been very polite, but very firm, in a manner that had given Kate chills. They had told him that he had a choice between working for them or being shipped off to Germany to a work camp, where he would be punished for failing to uphold his responsibilities as a German citizen. Davall had seen no choice but to comply, and joined nearly two hundred other men working to unload the boxes from the pallets, all the while trying to see how the experience could best be used to hurt the Germans.

If he could have destroyed the port and its facilities, he would have done so in a second, but there was nothing like enough high explosive in the cache to inflict more than a little damage. The docks were meant to have been sabotaged by the Home Guard and everything important removed or destroyed, but he’d heard enough chatter from the Germans to be certain that they had taken the docks almost completely intact. It irked him that it had been so easy for the invaders — the guards seemed to think that the English had been asking for it or that the defenders had been betrayed — but there was little that he could do about it until nightfall.

The whistle finally blew, and the workers gathered around the German sergeant. He passed out payment in German occupation script. They had been promised it was only temporary until Britain was completely conquered and brought into the Reich. Davall didn’t like the printed notes, with a neat image of Hitler himself on the back. The Germans had made it clear that it was occupation script or nothing. They’d informed the shopkeepers and farmers that the script was legitimate currency in the occupied zone and pasted up exchange rates, setting the script at a slightly higher value than British money. Davall suspected that the Germans were trying to bring them all into their monetary system, but there was no choice. Without it, how could he feed Kate and James?

“You will report back here tomorrow,” the German sergeant finally said and dismissed them. The Germans had more warm bodies than they really knew what to do with, although Davall suspected that it wouldn’t be that long until they had the entire population working for them full time. Now, however, they had the working hours divided up into sections and distributed them fairly evenly among the non-working population. “No work, no pay.”

“Thank you,” Davall murmured with the rest of them, as unenthusiastically as possible, and slowly followed the others out of the secure compound and into the outer dockyards. He knew who he needed to see but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to see her. His body was aching and in very real pain. He hadn’t been pushed like that since he had gone though the Grey Wolves training program and the Germans had pushed him right to the limits.

He passed a group of Germans and turned right into the entertainment street. The usual cluster of bars greeted him, along with a babble of happy conversation, most of it in German. The Germans had flooded into the area, and most of them were trying to have as much fun as possible during their leave periods. They danced, enjoyed some feminine company, and went back to their units feeling much happier with the world. Davall would have liked to have shorn some of the younger girls of their hair — some of them had husbands or relatives in the army or Home Guard — but he could think of nothing more likely to provoke a German reaction.

The brothel looked to be doing a roaring business as usual. He wasn’t surprised to see some of his fellow workers in the lines, waiting for their chance at a girl. Some of the men were married, and it was on the tip of his tongue to rebuke them before remembering that he was going to see a girl himself, and to all eyes, he was doing the same as them.

“She should be free in a moment, ducks,” the madam said, as she expertly relieved a bunch of Germans of their money and pointed them all into one room. Davall caught sight of a naked girl on her knees before the door closed and shuddered inwardly. The pleasures of the flesh, his father had told him, were a snare for the soul; that was doubly true when the slightest mistake could cost him his life. The door opened and a German, buckling up his trousers, exited in the direction of the showers.

“She’s all yours, my dear,” the madam said, and winked at him.

Davall kept his face carefully blank as he opened the door and stepped inside, careful to close the door behind him. Janine was sitting on the bed, as she had before, but this time there was a nasty bruise on the side of her face. Davall was over to her side before he was aware he had moved, examining the bruise and shaking his head. It looked as if someone had punched her.

“Janine,” he said, barely above a whisper. The noise of male shouts and catcalls rose up from the next room, and he flinched, despite himself. “What happened to you?”

“That one wanted it rough,” Janine said, as she pushed him away and fingered her wound. He was suddenly, devastatingly, aware of her — not of her nakedness, but of her vulnerability. She was nothing to him, or certainly she was supposed to be nothing to him, but he cared about her. He would have extracted her from the brothel if he could have done so, but where could he take her where she would be safe? Her hands touched her breasts and he saw more bruises against her pale flesh. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

The pain in her voice betrayed her words, but there was nothing that Davall could do. “You wanted to see me?” he asked softly. He didn’t want to talk business, but maybe she would take comfort in finding a way to hurt the Germans. “Did you find out a date for the attack?”

“I found someone who might know, as you requested,” Janine said. Davall felt his blood run cold; he had proposed it, when he had had the idea, half in jest. “There’s an SS officer, one of a group assigned to oversee this port, charged with providing security to the convoys that transport supplies from here to the port. He came here a week ago, chose me and…”

She smirked. “Very unimaginative man, for which I should be grateful,” she admitted. “He didn’t want much more than for me to lean back and think of Germany at first, but then… well, let’s just say I didn’t know SS men were allowed to be lazy.”

Davall felt his face blush red and half-covered his face with his hand. “I see,” he said, drawing his own conclusions. “How does this allow us to get him alone?”

Janine flashed a grin that would have done credit to a tiger. “The bastard likes his times with me so much that he’s actually hired me for the coming weekend,” she said. “He’s taken over a cottage just outside of town and has staffed it with a cook, but no one else as far as I could determine; he wants me there for a private party.”

Her breasts shook as she giggled. “I don’t know why he bothers,” she said, through quiet chuckles. “He never wants anything he couldn’t get right here.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like the thought of sloppy seconds,” Davall said, shook at the thought. It, more than the fading memory of Kate, reminded him that he didn’t really want Janine as anything more than an ally and a fellow Grey Wolf. “Did he ask you to bring anything with you?”

“No,” Janine said. She leaned closer. “You’re going to have to act like you’re not with me, so remember; you’re going to have to treat me as a possible enemy, understand?”

“Yes,” Davall said slowly. He leaned forwards and gave Janine a hug. “I understand.”

“Good,” Janine said, her hands gently touching his crotch, “Could I tempt you…?”

Davall understood the underlying message — she didn’t want to be alone or go back to customers who didn’t really think that whores had feelings — but he couldn’t stay with her much longer. If a German soldier decided that he had taken long enough and burst in on them, how could they explain him being fully clothed? The risk was just too great.

He kissed her on the forehead, but shook his head. “No,” he said, softly. “I’ll see you afterwards, when all this is over.”

The outside felt hotter than ever when he left the brothel and walked back towards his house. Life was returning to something like normality now that someone had cut down the bodies of the two hung men and buried them in the graveyard, but the permanent presence of the Germans was a constant niggling reminder of their position in the Reich. Davall was stopped and asked for his papers twice on his way home. The sight of five men and three women who had forgotten their papers, clearing rubble under German supervision, reminded him of the fate of anyone who showed the slightest hint of defiance. They were the lucky ones; they, at least, were still in Britain. He’d heard from other Grey Wolves that a line of British prisoners, taken in the war, had been driven in from the front lines one night, loaded on-board a German ship, and sent over to the continent. God alone knew what was happening to them there.

His real place of employment had been closed down for the moment. The Germans had visited with an SS squad, interrogated the owner — they’d found something really suspicious about the fact that it was a communal ownership — and ordered it closed down, along with the local newspaper and several other businesses. It had puzzled Davall at first, and in fact it had been Kate who pointed out that the supply shop for electronics could be quite useful if someone wanted to build a radio or a bomb.

He guessed that they were lucky that the Germans hadn’t rounded up everyone who worked there on suspicion, but for the moment they had inadvertently given him an excuse to go walking in the daytime. If he had no place of work, he’d argued, when the Germans had asked pointed questions, his wife wouldn’t want him around the house all day, would she? So far, it was working, provided he didn’t try to go out into the countryside. That was still off-limits.

The Bramble Cottages were right on the edge of town, a set of five cottages that had been built by a developer keen on hiring them out to families for a week, each one the very model of what a countryside house should be like. As far as Davall knew, they had all been empty when the invasion began, and therefore they had all been marked down as commandeered by the Germans. They hadn’t even won the war yet, he saw, and they had already begun to distribute the spoils of victory, including giving each of the cottages to a particular SS officer. Standartenfuhrer Ludwig Stahl didn’t seem to merit a cottage, or maybe he hadn’t bothered to try to claim one for himself, but Brigadefuhrer Franz Deininger, logistics officer, certainly had. It was convenient, perhaps too convenient, and Davall was seriously tempted just to pass up on the chance to interrogate the SS officer.

He grimaced to himself. The Germans had relaxed slightly after they’d shot the Davidson family and a handful of others, but unless they were fools, they probably knew that the Davidson family hadn’t really been involved with the Grey Wolves. They had shot the wrong people and heads would roll in Berlin — if Berlin cared — and the Grey Wolves remained intact… and the Germans would know that. Had they decided to create a fake Brigadefuhrer — a Brigadier General — and dangle him in front of their noses, in hopes of taking a Grey Wolf prisoner? That would mean that…

His mind ticked over the possibilities as he walked away from the cottages. The behaviours of people under occupation, he’d been warned, could be unpredictable; some of them might even betray their fellows just for a crust of bread, or some favour from their occupiers, or maybe even for revenge. The British Intelligence Service had studied, carefully, the behaviour of Frenchmen and Danes under German rule and had noticed some strange trends. Those who the Germans considered to be Aryan and treated better than the non-Aryans tended to respond well to their treatment, sometimes even falling completely into the German orbit. That was unsurprising…

But it didn’t stop there. Ordinary Frenchmen, people with little to look forward to but permanent subordination to the New Order, collaborated at will. Not just at gunpoint, which would have been understandable, but seemingly without any compulsion at all. Their world-view had been altered to the point where German supremacy seemed to be permanent. Those Frenchmen who disagreed either spent their lives in futile acts of rebellion or left for Algeria. Davall wondered, as he passed yet another German patrol, if that would be Grey Wolves’ fate as well. Would James, one day, betray his own father? Had one of the Grey Wolves already broken and betrayed them?

He saw a line of children emerging from one of the houses and felt his insides clench. If the Grey Wolves failed, if the Germans completed their conquest, if resistance was broken… those children would grow up in the knowledge that they would be permanently subordinated to Germany. The Germans hadn’t altered the school curriculum much - apart from an insistence that they all learn German — but that too would change; soon, the children would be saying Heil Hitler and informing on their parents. The Grey Wolves were fighting for the children’s future, even though they would never know the Grey Wolves’ names.

German soldiers appeared around the corner, marched through the children as though they weren’t there, and continued on past Davall. There was an entire line of German infantrymen marching into the distance; he turned his head to see them walking out of the town and up towards Ipswich. They acted like conquering troops, he saw, and wished that he had had the time to mine the roads before the Germans had marched over it and headed out. They would be going to the defence line… and he still had no idea when the attack would take place.

No, he thought, coldly. They needed that information, and there was only one way to get it. He pushed down all of his feelings and concerns. The Germans had moved beyond the pale when they had executed his friends for the actions of the Grey Wolves. If they refused to play according to the rules, such as they were, he refused to play as well. He would find out what he needed to know, whatever the cost, and ensure that the information was transmitted to the people who needed it.

With renewed purpose, he strode back to his home. There was much to be done before nightfall and then he must convince the others that he was right. That wouldn’t be easy.