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“Damn, damn, damn! God damn it!”
But Simon knew it was no use shouting up at the sky, especially as he was not actually shouting, only whispering lest he give away his position to someone who shouldn’t know it.
Cathy had been unimpressed, to put it delicately, when he’d volunteered to switch to photo-reconnaissance. He’d had to be honest with her, even if it won him little more than tear-filled disapproval: after Colditz, his mind and body craved the thrill. Flying a slim Spitfire instead of a bulky Wellington, too, helped him feel more free.
He was about to lose that freedom again, not to mention Cathy, the excitement, everything, if he didn’t act soon. And act he would. He’d escaped with his life, limbs, and appendages, and he’d escape from here — he would, because he’d be damned before he let anyone throw him back into the tedium of a prison camp.
He detached his chute and rolled off the patch of grass he’d landed on, and immediately felt his wrist seized by a Herculean grip.
The hand, he saw as it pulled him bodily toward a barn of some sort, belonged to a woman with a beret atop her hair and a long coat that flapped as she ran. Speaking in rapid-fire French, she ushered him inside and pointed at the floor, clearly instructing him to sit, before she dashed off again.
He let himself have a five-minute doze against the nearest bale of hay, though it felt like only a second or two until he heard footsteps.
“Ahem.”
The woman in the beret and coat had returned. He forced his eyes to open fully and stood to greet his rescuer.
“Squadron Leader Simon Carter.”
“Michelle Dubois. Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once.”
Simon strained to understand her. What little French he knew, he’d mostly picked up in Colditz from courtyard lessons and laughing attempts to chat to fellow prisoners, and he’d forgotten a lot of it after he’d escaped.
“Pardon?”
Michelle sighed deeply. “I said, listen very carefully…”
“Oh, oui!” Some of the words became more clear as he repeated them to himself. “Écoutez. Listen. Yes. What is it?”
“You will disguise yourself as a plumber and go to the Café René. Tell René, the owner of the café, that you are there to repair the pipes in the cellar. He will show you to the cellar. Await further instruction there.”
Simon understood approximately every fourth word. It was enough for him to grasp the situation, especially when Michelle handed him a plumber’s outfit complete with the sort of cloth cap he’d sewn dozens of at Colditz.
“Thank you. Merci.” He made haste to change, wondering if he could add his own jacket (he’d learned to be prepared for anything). It could get cold in this cellar he was going to hide in.
“What are you doing?!” Michelle exclaimed when he picked it up after changing the rest of his clothes. “A plumber cannot wear the uniform of the RAF! What is the matter with you?”
“No, non, regardez! See?” He showed her the other side, feeling not a little pleased at the opportunity to show off the ingenuity of it. “It’s a conversion. Look, you reverse it, like so…et voilà, a normal jacket.”
She watched him, looking somewhat but not completely convinced, as he finished reversing it and put it on.
“When you arrive at the café,” she said briskly after he’d buttoned it, “be sure to only say that you are a plumber. In fact, it may be better in some ways if you didn’t speak at all, but staying silent could also draw too much attention.”
“Right.”
She produced a piece of paper on which was written a few lines. “Read and repeat after me. ‘Hello, Mr Artois.’”
“Er…”
“Repeat!”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Artois.”
“I am the plumber.”
“Je suis le plombier.”
“‘Where is the cellar?’”
“Où est la cave?”
“One more time. ‘Hello, Mr. Artois.’”
Simon groaned inwardly, but he carried on. “Bonjour, Monsieur Artois.”
“I am the plumber.”
“Je suis le plombier.”
“‘Where is the cellar?’”
“Où est la cave?”
“Good! That is all you will need to say. Our people will know in advance that you are coming, but be sure that no others find out you are English or that you are an officer in the RAF. It is very, very, very important that the Germans don’t find out. Do you understand?”
“Well, of course,” he replied, bristling. What did this woman take him for?
“That means no speaking English in the café, no getting drunk…”
“I know - ”
“And absolutely no mentioning aeroplanes.”
That was the last straw. Simon drew himself up to his full height and let loose, although he wasn’t sure how much of it would be understood.
“Now, look here! I’m not some idiot 19-year-old on his first op. I happen to have escaped from the most high-security POW camp in Germany! I know what I’m about, and I don’t need to be cajoled and lectured like I’m a child!”
Having thus vented his feelings, he stood slightly askew, a sense of embarrassment at his outburst creeping in. Michelle, however, looked more pensive than offended. At length, she nodded and held out a hand. “Very good, Monsieur Carter.”
They shook hands solemnly before they crept out of the barn through a back passage like a pair of phantoms.
They walked awhile along a deserted road in silence. Just as Simon began to think that everything was going a little too smoothly, he heard the ring of an angry voice from somewhere dangerously close.
“Quick!” Michelle took him by the arm and pulled him behind a nearby tree. A minute or two later, a small group of German soldiers marched onto the road they’d just been on; at their head was a general, shouting something to his men with a pair of binoculars held up to his eyes. Simon couldn’t really make out what he was saying, but he was clearly dissatisfied.
As the group passed the tree they were hiding behind, the general lowered his binoculars, revealing a very familiar face.
“Colonel Preston?”
“What do you mean?” Michelle inquired in a whisper from beside him. “That is General von Karzibrot, the garrison commander in the next town over.”
Simon blinked hard and looked at the man again. He was the spit of Colonel Preston, which made the sight of him in a German uniform all the more appalling. Upon closer inspection, however, he was much greyer and frailer than his English twin — how the latter might look by the end of the war, perhaps, assuming he’d be forced to wait out the whole thing trapped in Colditz.
Simon felt a pang of sadness at the thought. What would Colonel Preston be doing now? What, for that matter, would his friends be doing? It was of course impossible for him to keep up a correspondence with any of them while they were still imprisoned, and he hadn’t heard of any escapes since his own. With Christmas not far away, it would be wonderful if someone could make a home run in time to reunite with their family…though now that he thought about it, he couldn’t be sure whether he would be home in time for Christmas.
He gritted his teeth and walked on with Michelle once the Germans had gone. He would get home soon. He had to.
The brief conversation with René the café owner went off without a hitch, or so it seemed to Simon. The man, supposedly quite a hero in Resistance circles, didn’t inspire any great feeling of trust — seemed downright reluctant to guide him to the cellar, in fact — but perhaps that was all in aid of the part he played. Put the enemy at ease by appearing too much at ease, or something like that.
Once Simon had sat down on an upturned crate, René rapped sharply on what turned out to be a false wall; it opened to reveal two men, who simultaneously shouted greetings at him.
“I brought you a friend,” René told them with a roll of his eyes before he turned to Simon. “Flight Lieutenant Fairfax and Flight Lieutenant Carstairs.”
Simon looked back and forth between the two of them. Although only two seconds had passed since the introduction, he’d already forgotten which was which. They didn’t look alike, not really, but they were afflicted with the same jauntiness of the moustache, the same silly grin.
“Er, my name’s Carter. Squadron Leader Simon Carter,” he said as he watched René turn tail and walk up the stairs. “How do you do?”
“Oh, thank God! Someone new to talk to,” said Fairfax-or-Carstairs, rushing forward to shake him by the hand. “It’s murder being stuck here without knowing a word of the lingo.”
Simon decided to let them talk; they were, obviously and understandably, desperate to complain about their plight to someone who’d be sympathetic.
“The nun costumes…”
“There was that time we dressed as Hitler Youth and went to the sea, but we jolly well assumed there’d be a submarine to pick us up. She expected us to row to England! Do you believe that? The bloody cheek!”
“We spent an awfully long time as a cow.”
“Our balloon was shot down…”
“That old plane from the museum…”
“Had to dress up as tarts and pretend to be shot dead…”
“We got ourselves thrown in jail for a bit.”
A horrible suspicion began to take root in Simon’s mind as they listed their tribulations. He’d assumed they’d been shot down recently as well, but he didn’t see how all of those things could have happened during a short stranding, unless…
“Wait, wait a minute. When were you shot down?”
Carstairs-or-Fairfax blithely gave the date, whereupon Simon felt his heart drop to the floor.
He’d encountered his share of buffoons, of course, and despaired many a time at a war effort that had to rely on them, but who in God’s name were these…children? They couldn’t possibly be real airmen. Could they be German spies?
“Do you mean to say,” he said slowly, scarcely able to believe the words his own mouth was producing, “that you have been trying to leave this place for two and a half years?”
“Yes, sir!” Fairfax-or-Carstairs replied, entirely too cheerful. “And a jolly difficult time we’ve had, I don’t mind telling you - ”
“No! Please don’t tell me.” Simon’s head was spinning. In fairness, it had taken him a similar length of time to get out of Colditz, but then he had been imprisoned, watched constantly, whereas the chances that had fallen into these two’s laps…
Suddenly, he understood Michelle’s earlier condescension toward him. “Oh, bloody hell,” he whispered.
“Sir?”
He put his face in his hands. Vision after vision of thwarted escapes attacked him, along with images of himself moving from wine barrel to mortuary to animal costume with only Carstairs and/or Fairfax for company, condemned to years of listening to them Good showing everything like deranged twin versions of Captain Bentinct-bloody-Boyle…
No, no, he had to stop this — it wasn’t doing him any good. Besides, he ought to be more charitable, though he found that difficult at the best of times. Maybe Fairfax and/or Carstairs simply had rotten luck, much like some of his former fellow POWs.
“I say, remember the time we tunnelled into the POW camp? It seemed a jolly good camp, with a proper escape committee and everything.”
“Yes! Shame we escaped instead of staying there like we were supposed to.”
It was then that Simon gave up trying to be charitable. The effort was wasted on the pair of them.
Mercifully, Michelle returned not long after the other two had disappeared behind the false wall again (“all this talking really tires a chap out, you know”). She had a man with her — tall and imposing, and dressed in the uniform of a gendarme.
“Good moaning,” he said, immediately becoming the furthest thing from imposing. “Michelle wanted moo to moot you. My name is Crabtree, and I am a Brotish urgent stationed here.”
Simon was no expert in French, but he couldn’t help noticing something odd about the way Crabtree spoke it. “Er, why are you talking like that?”
“Like what?” Crabtree replied in English.
“Like you can’t speak French.”
“Don’t know what you mean, old chap. I always got top marks for my pronunciation at the school of intelligence. Anyway, Michelle, Ronnie says the gloder is almost roddy. We are just wooting for the wangs to be dripped.”
“Excellent. Well, Monsieur Carter, it seems the preparations are going well.”
“Er…” Simon cleared his throat. “Je suis désolé pour, erm, avant. I didn’t realise you’d had…” He made a gesture toward the wall. “…them in your charge for so long.”
“It is nothing, Monsieur Carter,” Michelle replied with great magnanimity. “Are you ready for this evening?”
“Oui.”
“Good. Now, listen very carefully. I shall say this only once. At ten o’clock, you will sneak out of the café with me. It will be just you; Crabtree will take the other two separately. Next, we will all convene in a field not far from here. There is a mostly complete glider waiting for you, but we still need wings, so we have radioed to London to ask them to drop them off. Once you’ve got the wings, you will put them on and launch the glider, which will take you to a boat that will take you back to England. Have you got all that?”
Simon told himself that he had — near enough, anyhow. “I think so.”
“Wonderful. We shall see each other again at ten o’clock.”
Dix heures…now, had Michelle said “in ten hours” or “at ten o’clock”? Before he could reveal that he hadn’t actually understood everything, however, she had vanished like a phantom in the night, and so had Crabtree.
It was “ten o’clock,” a fact for which he was very thankful as he made his way to the field. Ten hours would have meant a significantly longer wait with nothing but stale bread to eat and no one but Fairfax and Carstairs to talk to. Waiting for the plane to drop off the wings was dull as it was.
At one point, he felt in his jacket for — yes, it was still safe, still lighting his way in the semi-darkness. He reverently lowered his lips to her lips.
“Is that a photograph of your wife?”
“What d’you - oh, oui! Cathy.”
“Cathy,” Michelle repeated wistfully. “She is very beautiful. You know, my colleague Henriette also has such long blonde hair.”
“Oh?”
“It cascades down her shoulders as she performs her heroic duty for France. She sometimes lets me run my hands through it, but I contemplate doing so every day…ah, here she comes!”
Henriette rushed over, her coat flapping above her white socks. She pulled Michelle close and whispered urgently in her ear; Michelle whispered back; she whispered again. This continued for several more turns.
“Oh, Michelle,” Henriette finally said in a non-whisper, her hands on Michelle’s shoulders, “you are so brave, helping save yet another one of these English idiots.”
Simon frowned. He couldn’t be certain, but Henriette seemed to just have referred to him as an idiot.
“I try my best for France,” Michelle replied modestly. “Embrace me before you go.”
The whispering session had gone on for ages, but it was nothing compared to the series of bisous that followed. Simon watched the back-and-forth of the two women’s heads as if hypnotised. He could feel his mind going numb; God, he was exhausted, and even watching other people enthusiastically moving their bodies was wearing him out. Where was this damn plane with the wings?
“Right, chaps, there’s been a bit of a cock-up,” Michelle said briskly to Fairfax and Carstairs, who’d also been watching the kissing. “The pilot plotted a course for Neuilly-sur-Seine instead of Nouvion, but luckily, he realised his mistake before he got all the way there. He’s turned around now and should be here soon.”
Simon felt his jaw unhinging itself.
“You speak English?!” he whispered furiously once he’d retracted it. “You speak perfect English, but you never once - you - ”
Michelle shrugged. “I’m sorry, Mr Carter. Look, think of it as me providing you with a rare chance to practise your French. You may escape from here, but it’s quite possible that you’ll be shot down again.”
The truth of that airy statement, infuriating though it was, could not be denied. Simon shut his mouth with a snap and looked up toward the sky, silently urging the plane to appear.
It was, according to Michelle’s watch, well past midnight by the time the wings came. He couldn’t help noticing as he helped assemble the glider that the seating area was a bit small for three men, but what did that matter now? They needed to get to the boat before it gave up and left without them. Something was telling him that this would be his only chance, that he would be stuck in Nouvion until the end of the war or the second coming, whichever happened first, unless he got out now.
“Best of luck, Monsieur Carter.” Michelle’s relief was palpable. “I hope I shall not see you again.”
“Same to you,” Simon replied; he wasn’t sure if he’d got the French correct, but the sentiment was most likely obvious. “Thank you for everything.”
The glider glided off the hill it was perched on and soared toward the river. As it approached the boat, Simon turned to the airman with fairer hair, who was seated uncomfortably close. “Good luck, Fairfax,” he told him, mustering all the faith and good cheer he could as they shook hands.
“I’m Carstairs, sir.”
“Right…well, there it is. Get ready to jump.”
“Jump?” Fairfax cried from behind him. “What do you mean, jump?”
“What do you - look, there’s nothing for it. We have to jump when we get close and land there, on that platform, see? Plenty of room for all of us.”
“But that’s - I can’t!”
“Come on, let’s go! Jump!”
He jumped; the others most assuredly did not.
Simon watched, open-mouthed, as the glider glided out of sight, carrying Carstairs and Fairfax and their shouts away into the darkness. “I…I suppose that’s that,” he said blankly to no one in particular; he received no response.
The bespectacled intelligence officer leapt out of his seat when he heard the name Nouvion. It was, Simon reflected through the blur of his thoughts, more than Fairfax and Carstairs had done.
“Sorry, old bean. Got a bit excited when I heard where you were. I used to be stationed there, you see.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” Captain Geering affirmed with a nod. “You’ll have met my old friend René, of course? Chap who owns the café? Yes, I thought you might. All that time, I never knew he worked for the Resistance. Had us all fooled! Anyway, we’ll need your help in that area.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know the other two chappies, Fairfax and, er…”
“Carstairs.”
“Yes, him — we’ve been trying to extract them for ages, as you know. Now, since you’ve been where they are, you’re well-placed to liaise with the Resistance. How would you like to work for intelligence?”
“I…”
Had he really been where they were? Simon had spent — thank God — only a day in Nouvion, and most of it hidden. On the other hand, the second or third thing Cathy had said after the customary exclamations of joy had been I do hope you’ll reconsider now. At the time, he hadn’t felt able to give a definite answer one way or the other.
He closed his eyes and recounted his experience to himself. He’d always believed that it was his duty to fly, to attack and later to photograph, but the prospect of being shot down again, possibly seeing the gormless faces of F. and C. or their equivalents elsewhere…
He squared his shoulders. “I’d like that very much.”
“Excellent.” Geering reached over the desk to shake his hand. “Excellent! You know, I can’t help thinking that someone like you would have been a great asset to the Fatherl - oops! Sorry! Don’t know what I was on about, old chap.”
The next day, Simon found himself staring at a radio as it crackled and whirred, signalling across the Channel.
“’Allo, ’allo, this is Nighthawk. Are you receiving me? Over.”
“And this is Blue Tit, here with Nighthawk,” a familiar voice added. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Two of the geese who were supposed to fly north for the winter are still here…”