“Seven inches. Just the right length to get through a thick overcoat and uniform underneath and still have enough left to penetrate the chest between the ribs.”
Boy, what a charmer, Bill thought.
Bill had already been in the army for six years. He had no real love for shooting or combat, for that matter. He’d even been given an old air rifle when he was young but never really understood the fascination. At school, shooting with a rifle as a cadet in the Officer Training Corps had come naturally to him. He soon learned he could also take the right wing off a gnat with a pistol. He should have had his shooting assessment annually, but Bill knew the assessor from his days at Bloxham School, and a couple of ounces of tobacco was enough to see him pass with flying colours and get the morning to himself.
Such was army life for Bill. Any excuse to do nothing and head into the nearest pub. He was glad to have chosen a desk job in the General Service Corps when he first joined up. He was well educated enough to know he didn’t fancy his career prospects being shouted at in the infantry for the next however-many years. Bill didn’t take kindly to being led by fools too keen to get a bullet in the belly, so he considered life as a junior intelligence officer most fitting to his keenness towards self-preservation. But, unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. A clandestine war behind enemy lines was a shock to his well-planned, uncomplicated life.
“Do you have somewhere better to be, Number Fourteen?” scowled the instructor.
It had been whispered among the other recruits that Mr Fairburn was recruited from the Shanghai Police and that he was the deadliest man in the free world with a blade. His eyes had the look of an alpha predator. Hungry for its next kill. He wasn’t young by any means. He must have been well into his fifties, but his movements seemed to defy nature. He held a rank of some sort but preferred Mr Fairburn or simply sir. He was well versed in the art of ending lives, so he’d probably served in the last war or somewhere else overseas.
Unlike the rest of the army, most of the staff here, other than the few you saw in uniform, seemed keen to drop any recognition of rank, including their own. As Bill would learn, this organisation functioned on information and trust, not egos. Among the recruits were civilians, civil servants, soldiers, officers, and even the odd member of the peerage. They were known throughout, including to each other, as numbers and nothing more. They were told lives may depend on not knowing each other, for now at least. The staff were generally just sir or ma’am.
They all knew it was something different. Untried. All they knew when they signed up for training was the name of this new organisation and that they would be expected to learn all the things required to survive, fight and kill behind enemy lines. It was apparent why ranks were irrelevant here. Some of the staff encountered on the course were civilians, who Bill and some other recruits on the course technically outranked. They were all small cogs in a faceless engine.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir,” replied Bill with a new, more obvious keenness.
“Good. Next, we shall move on to techniques. Remember, there are no rules. This is gutter fighting. Kill or be killed. No time for mercy. Once your target is identified, you must, at all costs, kill them. There is no time or place for risk. Incapacitating or rendering the enemy unconscious leaves you with the risk he may still be able to raise the alarm should he recover.”
Yup, thought Bill. A real charmer.
“You can forget all those Yank westerns where the hero creeps up, lifts the enemy’s chin and easily slits his throat. Apart from the shock, they will still be able to scream out and certainly still have time to flick off a safety catch and pull a trigger, compromising your position to a now vigilant enemy. If you are working silently, there is no finer weapon than the one you will handle today. This is the F-S knife. It will become the best friend you could wish for in the field.”
Bill looked grimly at the polished steel stiletto dagger being shown.
Christ, how the hell had he got himself into this?
“Now you try, up and in pairs, one from each pair take a training knife.”
Bill was determined to find someone weak. As he scanned the room, Fairburn appeared in front of him.
“Ah, Number Fourteen, there is an odd number, so you can help me demonstrate.”
Bill reluctantly took his position as the weak antelope while the lion stalked away to hide in the savanna behind him. He glanced into the box of blunt rubber training knives, then chanced a look at Fairburn to see him still clutching his own knife, just with its brass-tipped leather sheath on.
“Face the front, Fourteen!”
“Yessir, sorrysir,” Bill stammered.
“Now, remember, you want to get in as close as possible. Thrust the knife into the side of the neck. This is only the practice, so don’t try to hurt each other! Then you punch forward, taking out the whole throat. It’s messy but very effective.”
Bill felt the cold brass hit him in the neck. At that split second, it felt like a hammer blow, and he felt his vision dim like someone was dropping the theatre curtain for good.
Then everything went black.
“Ha ha, come on, son, wake up. It wasn’t that hard!”
Bill blinked at the spinning colours in front of his eyes. He had no idea how long he’d been out, but it seemed long enough for the others to have stopped and crowded around him.
“Right! Back to it, you lot! Your turn now, Fourteen!”
And that was how the rest of the day went on. Drilling with the knife and practising sticking it into various body parts like some obscene voodoo doll or a diviner testing for various fluids. At one point, Fairburn brought out some pig carcasses to practice on. The aim was to let the knife do the work. Very little pressure was necessary to get the blade in deep. The thin, prismatic shape of the long, pointed knife and its razor-sharp point and edges meant it went into flesh like butter.
Since arriving in Scotland, they had spent the past couple of weeks on various skills training. The first week had been dedicated to endurance, physical training, and escape and evasion techniques. Running up and down the multiple peaks of Inverness-shire in old, poorly fitted boots was not quite Bill’s idea of a fun time, but he had, so far, done well. From the beginning, he had planned not to come first or last at anything. Wherever he was in danger of winning the runs, he pulled up when out of sight to allow the rest to catch up, then tucked himself into the lead pack, allowing someone else the glory of coming first. He figured to join an organisation training people to blend in behind enemy lines. It was best to become ‘the grey man’. Inconspicuous was the aim of the game.
The staff had thrown in a few obstacle courses involving crawling on your belly and elbows through thorns and brambles under an old fishing net. It had led to an interesting night pulling thorns out of each other by candlelight. In his group, there had initially been thirty recruits. However, after the week in London taking psychological, intelligence and mental tests, the group had been reduced to twenty-two. They then boarded buses to head to Scotland, which the staff told them was phase two. By the end of the first week there, only thirteen remained.
There was still much more to come in Scotland; unarmed combat, demolitions, Morse code, weapons training and radio operations. Various specialists joined them to teach each set of skills, including an old Scottish captain, in full uniform, kilt and all, to introduce ‘ghillie’ techniques on how to blend into the environment. There was also an American known to Bill as Major Smith to teach how to strip and clean the various weapons that would be issued. The Colt 1911, a couple of revolvers, and the Thompson submachine gun.
Bill thought that Americans must make the best or the cheapest guns. Then he hoped it was the former.
Only five of the original thirty recruits remained at the end of phase two. Bill had been careful to not chat too much to his fellow recruits, but he was nevertheless sad to see some of them go. They would perhaps get supporting roles in the organisation or employment elsewhere in the services, he comforted himself.
The final phase of this initial training was parachuting at RAF Ringway in Cheshire. The recruits were housed in a stately home on the outskirts of the airfield. There was one thing, at least, that the Special Operations Executive did well: requisitioning the best buildings. Moreover, they had political clout because Bill was sure this would have been the base commander’s quarters during peacetime.
Another good thing about SOE was the breakfasts. Bacon, butter and sugar were supposed to be on the ration, but it seemed they had failed to mention this to their cook. On the second day, they had learned to control their gluttony after most of them had seen their breakfast come back up again the previous morning during the practice jumps from the tower. All the recruits passed the parachute phase, but Bill would never see them again. He never even knew their names.
Finishing school in Hampshire would be the culmination of training, where he would be thrown in with yet more strangers, all of whom had completed the other stages of training separately.