Operation Armageddon Read online

  As Bosanquet walked towards St James’s Park tube station, he could settle to nothing. He had no inclination to go back to his flat. He stopped, turned around and set off for an old haunt of his – the Pink Dragon in Theatreland.

  This small basement bar made little attempt to attract custom, having only a small plaque on its door and the statutory licensing notice above. It was a place which relied on its regulars – a place where they could meet their own kind. Being Theatreland, the clientele included more than a sprinkle of the sort of eccentrics who hover on the edge of the world of books and the theatre. With the company of an author who had been struggling with the same book for the last eight years, and an artist who was only in London to await the liberation of Paris, Bosanquet passed a pleasant hour untroubled by nagging thoughts of Armageddon.

  From there he walked on with no particular purpose in mind. He passed and ignored the darkened theatres until, standing outside the Gaiety, he caught sight of the name Sally Brewster. She was appearing in Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. His Sally – playing Raina. His Sally until that brute of a destroyer commander had lured her away when he was at sea. The ache for Sally was not diminished, nor the vision they once had of marrying and having two sons who would have glorious naval careers.

  Without understanding what he intended, Bosanquet reached into his pocket, fished out a half-crown and bought a seat in the gods. Soon, the packed audience, all desperate for some light-hearted amusement in the darkness of war, was lapping up Shaw’s comedy. Shaw mocked the over-patriotic Saranoff and the sympathetically portrayed pragmatic soldier Bluntschil, who kept chocolates instead of cartridges in his pouch. Yet Bosanquet could only see the play in his own terms. Did Sally throw him over because he was the too-serious Saranoff? And did Sally really want her lover to be like the trivial Bluntschil?

  When the play was over, Bosanquet went backstage. In his smart uniform and with his natural air of authority, no one challenged him as he made for Sally’s dressing room. He knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ she answered in the drained and casual manner of an actress exhausted by an evening on the stage.

  ‘James! It’s you. What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I was just passing when I saw your name on the board.’

  ‘I meant here in my dressing room, clot.’

  ‘I live in hope, Sally. Perhaps one day—’

  ‘Not that again, James. It’s over.’

  ‘Not for me. You looked so beautiful in your nightdress in the bedroom scene.’

  ‘Well, as I remember it, you weren’t in the bedroom much. You were always off on some secret naval assignation – if it was naval business that took you off so often.’

  ‘Sally, how could you! You know – you knew – that we can’t talk about what we do in war. Why couldn’t you trust me?’

  ‘It’s hard to trust when night after night you come home to a cold, empty flat.’

  ‘That’s cruel. And are you any better off with that commander of yours … what’s his name?’

  ‘Never mind his name. Yes, now you ask. He’s on convoys so he’s back quite a lot.’

  ‘I’m around most weekends now, as it happens. It could be just like old times.’

  ‘For you, maybe. Me, I want to move on. And you? What are you up to now?’

  ‘Plans Department. Lots of paper. Lots of ideas.’

  ‘And lots of action?’

  ‘That’s a probe too far. I can’t tell you more than is in the papers.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not one of your state secrets, are you off anywhere soon?’

  ‘No such luck. They keep me tied to the Admiralty House grindstone. I’m let out for a few hours to adore lovely ladies on the stage. Then it’s back to the files and the telephones.’

  ‘Well, James, I can’t say it’s exactly nice to chat. Although I’m glad you’ve come to no harm. Now do be a dear and leave me alone to scrape off this greasepaint.’

  A few drinks and several bruises later from his homeward journey in the blackout, Bosanquet crawled into bed. Yet it was not Sally that he thought of as he lay restlessly awake. Rather it was the black thought that the U-boat would sail before he could find its destination. ‘What if the Resistance can get no more detail? How can I convince the DNI to take the message seriously?’

  13

  While Bosanquet fretted at the lack of interest that his colleagues were taking in Armageddon, Marie’s interest was renewed when she saw the cargo U-boat arrive one morning. It’s coming was heralded by the departure of a couple of tugs. She had watched this type of operation many times. Out went the tugs and back would come a U-boat at the end of its weary patrol. Its dirty, stinking, exhausted men would struggle out to line up on deck and salute, before dragging their shattered bodies to their barracks.

  Today, the departing tugs were soon hidden by the mist. It was impossible for Marie to maintain a watch on the boat’s movements. That would have aroused suspicion – beyond even the suspicions already harboured by Beck. All she could do was to find every possible excuse to run an errand or deliver a message.

  So it was by mere chance that she saw the boat’s arrival an hour later. The leading tug, barely moving in the light swell, slowly took form, dragging its heavy cables. Then the rusty carcass of a war-torn U-boat came into view. The second tug steadied it against the cross-tide that was flowing past the harbour entrance. A few hours later the U-boat was safely moored in a pen which was a little to the north of the main office block. It was the cargo U-boat – the one in the order brought by the Vizeadmiral. Marie’s pulse quickened.

  ****

  Helberg’s telephone rang within minutes of the first mooring cable being wrapped around a bollard. He slammed his cap on, grabbed his greatcoat from the coat stand and thrust his arms into its capacious sleeves. With his coat still unbuttoned, he seized his black leather gloves and raced down the stairs. Almost running, he crossed the empty ground in front of the office block, while competing with the wind for control of his ballooning coat. He had succeeded in fastening a couple of buttons by the time he arrived at the pen.

  ‘My God! What’s this?’

  This cry of horror was ignored by the men working on the mooring cables.

  Helberg had been in such a rush to see the boat that he was the only officer on the quay. He and the boat, though, were well-protected by half a dozen guards with machine guns. For once, thought Helberg, Wohlman had got off his backside.

  Helberg’s preliminary assessment of the boat filled him with horror. It was a wreck, not much more than a pile of scrap iron. It was obvious that it had been reprieved for this operation from its well-deserved demise in a scrap yard. And he had to put this boat to sea in full working order with the least possible delay. The two patrol boats under repair would have to wait. Their forty days’ turnaround was already reaching sixty days. Now it would be more like sixty-five or even seventy. Helberg walked over to a dockside telephone and dialled a number. The seamen nearby heard a stream of angry commands. They exchanged shrugs and continued to tidy up ropes and put away tools. Helberg slammed down the handset, nearly shattering its tough Bakelite.

  Within a few minutes, two senior engineers were at his side, clipboards in hand. Helberg marched up and down the quayside, gesticulating in the air, pointing to the boat, stabbing his right forefinger into the chests of the engineers. Marie could see the two men scribbling notes while Helberg marched to and fro in an angry mood. Then with a final wave of his right hand, he dismissed the engineers. They left at a pace that suggested an unusual urgency.

  In the next half-hour men streamed from the repair pens, trotting and running towards the cargo boat. Some had tools in their hands, others dragged trolleys, yet others were pushing racks of oxyacetylene bottles. Within an hour the cargo boat resembled an ants’ nest as men swarmed all over it amidst a spaghetti-like tangle of pipes and wires.

  For the rest of the day, Marie was in an agitated state as she puzzled over what she had see
n. Her concentration sapped and she began to make minor mistakes in her work. At one point, her manager asked her why she had passed him a memorandum addressed to another manager. When the hooter blew at the end of the day, Marie gathered her things, put on her coat, turned up her collar and prepared to walk home. She needed the fresh air to clear her brain.

  Dusk had fallen. The cargo boat was now brightly illuminated by portable arc lights. The men were to work through the night. With her office window open, Marie could hear the hiss of the oxyacetylene cutters as tangled pieces of metal were stripped from the boat. At its rear a crane was lifting off a propeller with a mangled blade. The rust on the less damaged parts of the hull was being furiously scraped off by one set of men. Another set followed them with dripping brushes of red lead paint. Elsewhere men stood at portable forges from which sparks shot up into the night sky. It was like a Biblical depiction of Hell. And over it all stood the ever-present guards, machine guns at the ready.

  Marie congratulated herself on having correctly read the seriousness of the Vizeadmiral’s recent visit. This was what he had come about, she reminded herself. And it was clearly something of the greatest importance.

  14

  As she walked along the deserted road towards the town, the roar of the Atlantic waves, the ozone and the salt-laden air gave her a sense of freedom that she had not felt for a long time. She relaxed. For a few moments she even thought of that other place on the Atlantic coast – far away Finistère. Since the day that she had left home, aged fifteen, to work in Paris she had rarely returned there. She had no intention of being a fisherman’s wife, nor of spending the rest of her life in the claustrophobic world of remote Brittany. Yet, recently, there had been moments when that humdrum life was tempting.

  However, it was not in Marie’s nature to indulge for long in sentimentality or dreams of an easy life. She possessed too much hate – hate for the Nazis, hate for Beck, hate for the enslaved state of France – to allow herself indulgences. Her mind quickly turned to what she could do even, without a reply from London. And then the idea came to her. She smiled.

  Her plan needed the help of someone who hated the Nazis as much as she did. And someone who would never breathe a word of what she had done. Madame Martine Charrier, proprietor of the local officers’ brothel, was just the woman she needed.

  That evening, after dinner, Marie, now wearing dark slacks, a black jumper and a black wool hat, slipped out of Madame Rougier’s house and made her way to the rear entrance of Maison Charrier. Only Madame’s closet confidents knew the knock that opened this door. Marie was quickly in Madame Charrier’s private sitting room. Charrier welcomed her visitor much as a mother welcomes a daughter returned from a long and hazardous voyage.

  ‘Dearest Marie, you’re still here! I worry about you so much.’

  ‘Why do you worry, Madame? I’ve got a good job at the base. There’s no fighting here,’ protested Marie.

  ‘The base! Those Nazis! I know what they’re really like. I see it. Night after night. No one’s safe near them.’

  ‘Safe? Is that what we want? Is that what we can allow ourselves to want?’

  ‘Why not, dear Marie?’

  ‘Because it’s our duty to want to see France free again. That comes before safety.’

  ‘If you say so, my little one.’

  ‘I do. And that’s why I’m here … to ask you to do something – something that’s not “safe”.’

  ‘Tell me. You know I can’t refuse you.’

  And so Madame listened to Marie’s plan.

  Half an hour later Marie left Maison Charrier with a light heart, having heard Madame’s fulsome agreement to play her part in uncovering Operation Armageddon. Marie had been confident that Madame would fall in with the plan: her past was enough of a guarantee.

  Charrier had been born in Belgium in 1904 in the town of Leuven. Her father was a sexton at the cathedral – a job he adored at a church he loved. Their happy family existence ended in late August 1914 when the German army arrived and began to destroy the undefended town. The ancient library was burnt to the ground; the cathedral was severely damaged; and their house, like so many others, was ruined. Her last memory of the town was of being herded into the railway station at the point of a gun. She never saw her home again and her war was one of terror and near starvation under German occupation. When the war ended, Charrier fled as far as she could from the Germans. She thought she was safe on the Atlantic coast. But even here the Germans, in the shape of the Nazis, had caught up with her yet again. Her brothel was her revenge. She, whose whole business depended on her capacity to keep confidences, now took advantage of the invaders for whom she felt a fathomless contempt. Large and domineering, she knew how to use obsequious courtesy to lure German officers into betraying secrets. All that was needed was one phone call.

  15

  Helberg was not surprised when he received a telephone call from Madame Charrier the next day. She always knew how to look after the interests of her regulars.

  ‘My dear Herr Helberg, I thought you would like to know that Véronique will be with us this evening. She asked me to let you know specially.’

  ‘That’s most kind of you, Madame. Do tell Véronique that I shan’t disappoint her.’

  As Madame’s handset dropped onto its cradle, she said to herself ‘And you had better not disappoint me, Herr Helberg.’ She sent for Véronique, who received the most extraordinary instructions for the evening.

  ‘But why, Madame?’

  ‘Never you mind. There are some things it is best not to know.’

  The rest of the day at the base was a nightmare that Helberg longed to escape from. He had been hassled by phone calls from headquarters demanding what felt like hourly reports on the repair of the cargo U-boat. He, in turn, had been haranguing suppliers and pleading with nearby bases for spares. He had even had to authorise the removal of parts from his patrol boats under repair to put into the cargo boat. Helberg knew he would never see them again. So, when he slammed his office door behind him that evening and exchanged bellyaches with his secretary – who had had an equally bad day – his devotion to duty was at a low ebb. He would forget it all at Maison Charrier.

  A few hours later Helberg was washed, refreshed, and in his best uniform. With a bunch of flowers in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other, he was standing on the doorstep of Maison Charrier. He straightened his uniform, pulled his sleeves down, took out a handkerchief, and whisked a trace of mud off one boot. A speck of fluff on his jacket caught his eye. He despatched it with a flick as precise and delicate as that which a watchmaker might use to clean a balance mechanism. His hand went to the doorbell, discretely labelled “Charrier”. Then he remembered his beard and smoothed down its tough black fibres one last time. Drawing himself up to the most he could manage of his short stature he finally pressed the bell button.

  A familiar face opened the door an inch or two – just enough to check the identity of the caller. He was puzzled at her greeting:

  ‘Welcome, Herr Helberg. Madame is expecting you.’

  The girl took him over to a secluded seat in the salon area.

  ‘Would you wait here a moment please?’

  The huge downstairs salon was familiar to him. The walls were richly decorated with depictions of luxuriant flowers and vines laden with succulent fruit. Amongst these frolicked scantily dressed women of classical times. The rich brocades at the windows, the velvet couches, the dim lights and the discrete corners completed the atmosphere of luxurious decadence. All the low tables were strewn with glasses and half-empty bottles of champagne. In the background was the gentle sound of popular songs being played on a gramophone. Madame’s “staff” lounged, flounced or flirted as the mood took them with half a dozen or more officers. The air was heavy with scent, alcohol fumes and cigar smoke. The final touch of a variety of discarded military jackets showed that business was good that night.

  Helberg was surprised that there was no sign
of Véronique. Instead, Madame Charrier came forward and ushered him into her private boudoir. In many ways this resembled the more public salon, but the fine oil paintings adorning its walls testified to the many rewards of looted artworks that her clients had bestowed on her. Madame had struck rich from the presence of the invaders.

  Charrier invited Helberg to take a seat on one side of her well-built fire. She placed two glasses on the low table between them and began to pour champagne. As she poured she said: ‘I am so very sorry for our little change of plan, Herr Helberg. Véronique’s mother has been taken ill. She’s had to take her to hospital. She’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ said Helberg, more concerned about how long Véronique would be away than the state of her mother’s health.

  ‘I don’t think so – it’s only a fall. I expect the hospital visit is just a precaution.’

  ‘Perhaps I should go,’ said Helberg.

  ‘Oh, please don’t go. We’re so honoured to have you here. And Véronique’s misfortune gives us the chance to chat.’

  Helberg said nothing as he raised his glass and gave a nod of assent before sipping Madame’s champagne.

  ‘That’s some champagne! Where did you get that?’

  ‘Come now, Herr Helberg, you know that I never have to buy a drop. You and all your kind officers keep me endlessly supplied. It’s a question of “Where do they get it?”’

  Helberg wisely did not attempt to enlighten Madame on this point. He had his suspicions, but preferred not to look into such things.

  ‘How are things at home?’ asked Madame.

  ‘My wife has a new job at the Air Ministry. Of course, the children are away in the south with her parents.’

  ‘The bombing?’

  ‘Yes. Fortunately, it’s not as bad as last year – the Allies are too busy attacking our U-boat bases to bother much with Berlin.’