The Doomsday Testament - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора James Douglas (IX) #9

IX

Jamie’s heart quickened. He was closing in on Operation Equity.

I have a great deal of respect for Fitzpatrick. He has led three Jedburgh operations in France and Holland, and I know only too well the kind of strength, physical and mental, that is required to survive that kind of test. Still, it is difficult to describe the loathing I felt for him at that moment.

For weeks we have been swanning around Germany in the wake of the Allied spearhead, strong-arming German mayors and interrogating hundreds of suspect men and women. Strange that not one of them had ever been a Nazi, in a country where the majority of people who weren’t Nazis ended up in the awful concentration camps we’ve liberated. After Belsen my German tastes like vomit in my mouth. We still lose a few men to ambushes and accidents, but we regard this holiday from the war as just recompense for our earlier efforts, which were considerable. Compared to Malestroit and Arnhem this was a picnic.

Frowning, Jamie tapped the word ‘Jedburgh’ into the laptop Gail had brought to the hospital. Pages and pages on a quaint historic market town in the Scottish Borders. Puzzled, he added the word ‘operations’… and was invited into a deadly new world.

Jedburgh was the code name for small teams of highly skilled clandestine soldiers, operated by the Special Operations Executive and the American OSS, who were dropped by parachute into Occupied France prior to the D-Day invasion. This also explained the reference to the meeting in Baker Street — the location of SOE headquarters. Unlike SOE’s undercover agents, the first priority of the Jedburghs, normally a three-man unit composed of experienced special forces soldiers from the United States, Britain and the host country, was not to gather information or carry out sabotage. Instead, their primary purpose was to liaise with local resistance movements and provide guidance, training and access to weapons. Sometimes this would involve a few dozen men, but in one well-recorded case, in Brittany, more than a thousand resisters supported by Jedburgh teams and a squadron of French SAS, had fought an entire German regiment to a standstill.

Now Jamie knew how Matthew had been employed after he returned from North Africa. He could only imagine the strain of hiding for weeks on end behind enemy lines, under the constant threat of betrayal or discovery. The Jeds dropped in uniform, but that meant little after Hitler’s ‘Commando Order’ in October 1942, which sentenced captured Allied raiders to death without trial. The war had almost run its course, but now they had a new and unwanted mission to complete.

Fitz at least had the grace to look embarrassed when he handed over our orders. Two three-man teams, codenames Dietrich and Edgar, commanded by Captain Matthew Sinclair, will proceed south-west to a given map reference, where they will be issued with further orders. This mission, Operation Equity, is to be treated with the utmost secrecy — which I took as the greatest insult of all, since I have been operating in the utmost secrecy for the last four years. I should tell him I am the wrong man for this job. That I am burned out and numb, and that I welcome the numbness because it protects me from the man I have become. The war has drained me of all humanity. I feel like a boxer at the end of a fifteen-round contest. I have nothing more to give.

What is war? War is chaos and stupidity as the norm; hunger as a constant companion; death — non-judgemental, arbitrary, messy death — ever-present and around every corner; a callous disregard for life or the living, ingrained so deep a more religious man would call it evil. And of course hatred. Hatred for the people who made you like this, hatred for the enemy who wants to kill you, hatred for the bovine civilians too stupid to run away, hatred for the mines and the bombs and the bullets and the shells and the flame-throwers, that will castrate, mutilate, eviscerate or incinerate, just state your preference. Oh, yes, you can hate an inanimate object, just as you can hate the dead for making you kill them. You hate the tanks and the planes and the guns, as long as they are the other side’s tanks and planes and guns. You very quickly learn to love your own tanks and planes and guns in the same way you love the soft, red Saxon earth that crumbles beneath your entrenching tool to give you sanctuary, right up to the moment it buries you alive. You hate the trees, for giving shelter to the enemy and for those great, jagged, TNT-propelled splinters that can tear out a man’s eyes or his throat. You hate the birds for giving away your position. You hate the weather, in all its many forms, because heat and thirst can kill you just the same as damp and cold. You hate your friends, because you know they are going to die all too soon. But most of all you hate yourself.

I could tell him all that, but I won’t because I know it won’t do any good. Whatever the mission, I am the best man to complete it. I know it as well as he does.

Jamie paused and re-read the last passage. He had believed he had no illusions about war, but the war Matthew fought was one he struggled to comprehend. This was victory, the Allies had cut deep into the Third Reich and the outcome was no longer in doubt. Yet his grandfather recorded it with all the pain and despondency of a defeat. Travelling in two armed reconnaissance jeeps, a subdued Matthew and his five companions — two British SAS men, an American, a Frenchman and a German-speaking Pole, who had to be Stanislaus Kozlowski — had set out at dawn.

Progress is slow because the Yank columns we drive past are nervous. Like us they feel it would be silly to be killed when the war is almost over. The remnants of the Fourth Panzer Army are heading our way with the Russians on their tail and we are meeting local opposition. Some of the Gerries still don’t know when they are beaten. Our American allies have an interesting way with snipers. We were stopped for an hour near Jena while they dealt with some chap who’d taken a potshot at a convoy from an isolated farmhouse. A British unit would have sent in a patrol to flush him out. The Yanks called in an air strike by three rocket-firing Typhoons and then sent in Firefly tanks to finish the job with their flame-throwers. By the time the shooting stopped, the farmhouse was just a blackened pile of bricks. A GI major emerged grinning from the smoke with the sniper tied to the front of his jeep like a hunting trophy. The Gerry must have been thirteen years old.

Their destination was close to a pretty Bavarian town that had been left eerily untouched by the war.

We drove west out of Coburg into a heavily wooded area where the Americans have set up a reception centre. It isn’t a prison camp, at least not so you’d recognize it. No machine gun towers or searchlights, just a group of wooden huts hidden behind a barbed-wire fence among the trees. I handed over my orders at the gate and was told to report alone to a building at the far side of the complex. The officer behind the desk had the coldest face I’d ever seen; a long nose and thin lips, eyes like ice-chips. The kind of face that would send a man to his death and not even blink. He wore the uniform of an American colonel, but I doubt he’d ever been on a parade ground. I loathed him on sight. Behind him stood two others, dressed in civilian suits but with military haircuts. I recognized the breed immediately. I was back in cloak and dagger land, but these cloak and dagger types weren’t the usual enthusiastic SOE amateurs, they were genuine hard-eyed, government-sponsored killers. The officer didn’t introduce himself. ‘You’re familiar with the area around Lake Constance, Captain.’ I admitted I’d done some walking there before the war and he nodded. He handed over a sealed envelope and without another word one of the civilians escorted me to a door at the rear. Beyond the door, three seated figures in khaki overalls were waiting on a bench by the far wall. One had a leather briefcase perched primly on his knees and looked up with a wide smile. Two of them were the most evil men I would ever meet. The third was Walter Brohm.